Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!lethe!tvcent!comspec!scocan!john
From: john@sco.COM (John R. MacMillan)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Unix vs. Mainframe editors
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.210853.1386@sco.COM>
Date: 25 Mar 91 21:08:53 GMT
References: <22860@oolong.la.locus.com> <14222@life.ai.mit.edu> <1991Mar21.145424.15222@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Sender: news@sco.COM (News administration)
Organization: SCO Canada, Inc.
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|>What features do ISPF and XEDIT give you that are so sorely lacking
|>in Emacs?
|
|I'd like it if some mainframers could explain what they like about XEDIT.

In another life I used XEDIT a lot, so I'll take a shot at this.  It
could get a bit off topic in places.  Much of this also applies to ISPF.

First, you have to get used to the idea of working on a block mode
terminal.  When you press the up arrow, and the editor doesn't scroll,
it's because the editor never sees the keystroke.  Whether terminals
should work this way or not is another debate.

Now, what I liked:

XEDIT was a programmable editing/display engine.  It was flexible
enough in this regard that you could use it for full-screen
applications, either on its own or within ``shell'' scripts.  Many of
the tools I used regularly were XEDIT programs.  And they didn't
necessarily look like the editor.  I know emacs can do this to some
extent, but I don't think it allows you to set attributes within the
file being edited (video attributes like reverse, protected, etc.), or
allows enough control over exactly what the display looks like (I
could be wrong on this, it's been a while since I stopped using
emacs.  I also found emacs to be rather slow to start up, perhaps
because its design philosophy assumes that you typically didn't enter
the editor often; this discourages its use as an editing tool.

The other thing I liked was not strictly speaking an editor feature.
The editor command language was the same as the system command
interpreter (EXEC then EXEC2 then REXX (actually, then REX then REXX))
so I didn't have to switch languages around.

This is where I start to digress.  One of the things I love about UNIX
is that it's easy to write and use your own tools.  One of the things
I liked about various mainframe environments I've used (mostly CMS and
NOS/VE) is the way the tools are so well integrated.  In NOS/VE the
debugger was programmable in the system command language.  I think
UNIX would benefit from a standardized method for tools being able to
communicate and provide services to other tools, so that dbx or your
editor could say, ``Hey, /bin/sh, handle this script for me, but
instead of trying to exec the commands, just give them back to me so
that if I understand them I can execute them.''