Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!umich!itivax!scs
From: scs@itivax.UUCP (Steve C. Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Pager limitations
Summary: Why not build in less?
Message-ID: <299@itivax.UUCP>
Date: 9 Oct 88 17:15:10 GMT
References: <958@raspail.UUCP> <4035@pbhyf.PacBell.COM>
Reply-To: scs@itivax.UUCP (Steve C. Simmons)
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute, Ann Arbor
Lines: 29

In article <4035@pbhyf.PacBell.COM> rob@pbhyf.PacBell.COM (Rob Bernardo) writes:
>regular expressions would be nice. Is
>regex(3) and recmp(3) (part of libPW.a) found on most UNIX systems?
>(If not, we'd have to come up with look-alikes to include this capability
>uniformly. - >groan<)

Why not use the regex suite that was posted?  It's as close a match
as you're likely to find on compatibility; many sites have adopted it
as their standard; it's faster than blue blazes, and the more common
it gets the closer it gets to becoming the standard.  Wouldn't it
be nice if ed, ex, vi, grep, sed, sh, ksh, csh, etc all used the same
regular expression?  Strike a blow for compatibility.

>I hope to have enhancement worked out and submitted for the official
>release of elm 2.2. Maybe this is a good time to rewrite *all* the pager
>stuff since, if you saw the other postings here about scrambled stdio
>buffers, the interface to standalone pagers needs revamping as well.
>Got my work cut out for me. :-(

Again, how about a blow for compatibility?  If the author will grant
permission, it probably wouldn't be that hard to shoehorn less right
into elm.  The big diffs would be teaching it that BOF/EOF should be
replaced by BOMsg/EOMsg, and an "escape" mode to let the elm j/k/d/etc
commands work.

-- 
Steve Simmons		...!umix!itivax!scs
Industrial Technology Institute, Ann Arbor, MI.
"You can't get here from here."