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From: toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: MEL - A *Real* Programmer
Keywords: Real Programmer, Hacker
Message-ID: <8387@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 6 Nov 90 00:16:48 GMT
References: <1990Oct23.235720.16178@nas.nasa.gov> <6089@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu> <54296@brunix.UUCP> <5777@suned1.Nswses.Navy.MIL> <8187@gollum.twg.com> <1283@gvgspd.GVG.TEK.COM> <10293@ubc-cs.UUCP> <1990Nov5.082657.28368@tkou02.enet.dec.com>
Reply-To: toma@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM (Tom Almy)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 32

In article <1990Nov5.082657.28368@tkou02.enet.dec.com> diamond@tkou02.enet.dec.com (diamond@tkovoa) writes:
>In article <10293@ubc-cs.UUCP> buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland) writes:
>>In article <1283@gvgspd.GVG.TEK.COM> mrk@gvgspd.GVG.TEK.COM (Michael R. Kesti) writes:
>>>Just to add fuel to the fire, I think that using "i" (or any other single
>>>letter name" for a variable is horrible practice.  Try searching for all
>>>occasions of it in a function!
>>No sweat, if you have an editor that can find the pattern 
>>"non-alphabetic, followed by 'i', followed by non-alphabetic".

>How does your editor know if the newline character preceding the line,
>or the newline character following the line, is supposed to be regarded
>as a "non-alphabetic" or not?
>I've used a dozen editors that had search patterns including "beginning"
>and/or "end" of line, but none that accepted an "or" operation on
>line-break "or" character class, in a single search pattern.

I imagine that there would be a problem with editors that treated lines
as some special entity (example editors: vi and ed). For *many* years
I used TECO which would easily search for <non-alphanumeric>i<non-alphanumeric>
and I still have a copy of TECO which I could use.

On MS/DOS I use Epsilon (an EMACS clone) which will also search "whole
words only" as will the vererable WordStar, and it's clone editing
environments in the Borland "Turbo" language programming environments.

None of these editors treat the the "new line" character in a special
way. In fact I'd often delete blank lines by doing global search and
replace of "\n\n" with "\n".

Tom Almy
toma@tekgvs.labs.tek.com
Standard Disclaimers Apply