Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!xrtll!silver
From: silver@xrtll.uucp (Hi Ho Silver)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Re: I'm dreaming of a SMALL SIMPLE ASCII EDITOR
Message-ID: <1991Jan4.003528.7286@xrtll.uucp>
Date: 4 Jan 91 00:35:28 GMT
References: <1683@marlin.NOSC.MIL> <1990Dec27.231138.10083@mstr.hgc.edu> <1991Jan1.093027.11480@contact.uucp> <11644@j.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: silver@xrtll.UUCP (Hi Ho Silver)
Organization: Yeah, right.
Lines: 32

In article <11644@j.cc.purdue.edu> zhou@brazil.psych.purdue.edu (Albert Zhou) writes everything but the first line of his article:
$a good idea to have a powerful full screen editor (not edlin!) as part of
$DOS standard and put into ROM.

   While there are ROMable flavours of DOS around (e.g. DR-DOS), DOS in
general is not found in ROM.

   If I understand your article, you're suggesting that a full screen editor
should be loaded into memory with the kernel at boot time.  This is basically
a waste of address space for the vast majority of DOS users.  Most users use
DOS as a program to load in their favourite applications - word processors,
spreadsheets, databases, etc.  If they want to edit something, it's far
more likely to be a letter in their word processor than a batch file or
C program, and they'll want and need their word processor to do it.  

   If, on the other hand, you're suggesting that a decent editor should be
included on the DOS distribution diskettes, you're suggesting something
that has been suggested thousands (millions?) of times before, and Microsoft
claims to have listened.  Last I heard, which was a while ago, DOS 5.0 was
supposed to include a screen editor.  Once they get around to releasing it,
we'll see just what they've come up with.

   Even if they do, though, it won't really affect me.  I do my DOS
programming on my machine, which I can equip with whatever editors suit
my needs.  For user support, I'll still have to carry around two diskettes
(5.25", 3.5") with TED and a vi clone, since the majority of PCs will be
running DOS 3.x or 4.x for quite some time.
-- 
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