Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!agate!shelby!neon!lucid.com!jwz From: jwz@lucid.com (Jamie Zawinski) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ti.explorer Subject: Re: Do people still use Explorers? Message-ID: Date: 28 Nov 90 22:25:51 GMT Sender: jwz@lucid.com Organization: Lucid, Inc., Menlo Park, CA Lines: 47 Bjorn Victor wrote: > And, to lead into the other subject, it's a real nice hacking machine. > I can spend hours fixing a subtle bug, or re-implementing a nice > feature from somewhere else, and it's FUN! On the other hand, it's > fun hacking Emacs lisp too (e.g. re-implementing Zmacs features), and > on the third hand, I really should do something completely different > -- my research. But Zmacs is so much better than GNU Emacs in so many ways... even down to the datastructures! GNUmacs is character-oriented rather than line-oriented, which makes a lot of things next to impossible to do. Lines don't have plists; you can't elide arbitrary sections of text the way VisiDoc does; the first insert after a move in any file larger than ten megs takes up to half a minute (because GNUmacs has to move the one and only one "insertion hole"). Minor modes in GNUmacs are almost impossible to implement correctly. I think TAGS tables suck. Both conceptually and in the current implementation. I could go on and on... Also all of the GNU Emacs mail readers are substantially more lame. Hans Chalupsky: >- development environments (such as various fancy lisp-modes for GNU emacs) > are (in my opinion) better then the TI-Explorer environment (there are still > a few things missing such as window based debuggers and inspectors, but you > can get approximations of those in the Allegro composer or Sun's SPE) Pale imitations at best, and really slow from what I've seen... The Lispms have the state-of-the-art in development environments, even though they're going the way of the dinosaurs. But we'll fix that soon :-) Bjorn: > I think Emacs will eventually have most of Zmacs' "graphic" features (e.g. > multiple fonts), but some of the other bugs are very hard to get out. And it > will always live with 8-bit characters, which is a loss from the 12-bit LISPM > characters. You can't both have "clean" ISO 8859-1 and a Meta key, for > instance. I'm not convinced: just because you can't have 12-bit characters in a file doesn't mean you can't have 12-bit input. If input was event-based instead of character based, then under X you could easily have seperate keybindings for left-shift-cokebottle and right-shift-cokebottle... Do any of you have Explorers at home? I've often considered buying a used one to play with, but I'm a bit concerned about power/temperature requirements, and availability of spare parts. Anyone have any comments? -- Jamie, considering getting CDRNEXT on my license plate.