Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!ukma!gatech!mcnc!decvax!ucbvax!HNYKUN53.BITNET!SCHOMAKE
From: SCHOMAKE@HNYKUN53.BITNET (Lambert Schomaker)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: Opinion. TPU, EDT
Message-ID: <8802051623.AA17951@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 5 Feb 88 11:12:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 57

[]
The following message shows, once again, there is something wrong
with TPU

> Subj: EDT-emulation in TPU
>        I'm without a TPU manual and I'm trying to find out how to
>modify EDTSECINI so that it emulates EDT a little better.
>
>        1: How do I make UP and DOWN work so that it uses screen columns
>        ..........
>               ........................ The "VAXTPU EDT Keypad Emulator"
>               handbook says it's possible but does not go into detail.
>        2: How do I get FIND to search for the end-of-line as part of a
>               search string.  I use end-of-line and form-feed a lot in
>
>mike,    mcguffey@muvms1.bitnet

If we step back in history, we'll remember:

1) The old RT-11 EDIT.
      Character-oriented and powerful in that sense but not very user-friendly,
      (remember the ESC terminator?).

2) RSX's (and DSM's) EDI.
      Line oriented, much more user-friendly but we lost the
      ability to fiddle with end_of_lines.

3) EDT.
     Full-screen/Line-oriented/Character oriented.
     Now here we have a powerful editor, for interactive work as well as
     for off-line text processing. The only functionality I missed was
     the "wild" change from EDI:  "C/The...man/Nothing", and, somewhat later,
     multiple windows, after I had seen Emacs.

4) TPU/Eve.
     Full-screen/Multiple-Windows.
     Is this really an improvement? In my opinion Eve is only a very
     rudimentary editor. Maybe you can get used to its user interface, but it
     doesn't have the inbuilt power of EDT. Naturally, you can make your
     own routines but that is not what I am hired for (I won't even speak
     about TPU's verbosity here, as compared to EDT change subcommands).

It looks like we have reached a stage where you can only speak of _changes_
in software instead of _improvements_. As long as there is no good EDT
emulator written in TPU, provided and supported by DEC, with multiple windows
as _additional_ functionality, I will still be using the old EDT.

However, I do not doubt the power of TPU as a text processing language, but I
think its complexity (syntax, compiling etc) puts to much of a burden on the
user, even if he's a good programmer. Why learn TPU as a language? We already
have Snobol, Icon, Pascal, C and even Fortran-77...

I would be very dissappointed in DEC if EDT (i.e., the full functionality
of EDT) is going to be dropped in VMS V5.x.

             Lambert Schomaker
             schomaker@hnykun53.bitnet