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From: rhys@cs.uq.oz.au (Rhys Weatherley)
Newsgroups: comp.specification.z
Subject: Re: Prove me wrong
Message-ID: <2223@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au>
Date: 29 Jun 91 01:47:00 GMT
References: <1991Jun28.175058.4987@agate.berkeley.edu>
Sender: news@cs.uq.oz.au
Reply-To: rhys@cs.uq.oz.au
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In <1991Jun28.175058.4987@agate.berkeley.edu> bks@lima.berkeley.edu (Bradley K. Sherman) writes:

>Back to the drawing board and come up with an unambiguous syntax
>expressible in the intersection of the ASCII and EBCDIC codes
>and we can make some progress.

>We just don't have the time to muck with Troff or Latex just to write
>down our specs for the systems.  Also we'd like to see the specs online.

How about a graphics-based Z editor under SunView or X/Windows?  There are
people here at UQ working on such a beast and it's quite trendy.  You can
mix explanatory text, Z specs and even code if you like.  But it's still
coming along at the moment.

ASCII and EBCDIC terminals are quickly going the way of the dinosaur with
graphics terminals, high-resolution PC's, etc, becoming more common-place.
As for sending such specs through the mail, etc, the new mail format
Internet Draft specifies how you can send images, TeX documents, etc
through the mail and have them intelligently processed and displayed at
the other end, so that's not a problem either anymore.  (Given a year or
two for the mail and news readers to be updated :-).

As this progresses you won't need to think in ASCII or EBCDIC anymore, but
documents, so Z will fit in no worries with the emerging editors and
mail processing standards.  Think of writing a Z spec (or any spec for that
matter) as being an exercise in desktop publishing.

Cheers,

Rhys.

+=====================+==================================+
||  Rhys Weatherley   |  The University of Queensland,  ||
||  rhys@cs.uq.oz.au  |  Australia.  G'day!!            ||
||       "I'm a FAQ nut - what's your problem?"         ||
+=====================+==================================+