Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!cs.tcd.ie!tcdmath!gwills
From: gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Keyboards etc...
Message-ID: <229@maths.tcd.ie>
Date: 17 Jan 89 10:14:16 GMT
References: <8901160212.AA29231@pinocchio.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills)
Organization: Maths Dept., Trinity College, Dublin
Lines: 37

In article <8901160212.AA29231@pinocchio.UUCP> bzs@pinocchio.encore.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>
>Perhaps the problem is they're solving a problem the majority
>of people don't particularly feel needs solving?
>
>That's a common effect in the computer industry, wonderfully elegant
>solutions to non-problems. It's one of the trickiest things in this
>industry to predict the success of and one has to learn how to become
>aware of this possibility through painful experience.
>
>Some examples, other than Dvorak keyboards:
>
> [ ... some examples ... ]
>
>3. "High-level" programming language
>text editors (ie. editors that would detect certain bugs as they were
>typed in.)
>
	Funnily enough, one of the most popular, and possibly THE most popular
	pascal programming environment for the Macintosh is Lightspeed Pascal.

	This incorparates an editor of the type mentioned above; it will
	automatically indent when necessary, put a line feed after a semi-
	colon, flag syntax errors, highlight keywords in bold. None of these
	features can be turned off (some people reading this will immediatly
	dislike it), and it is still the most friendly pascal editor I know.
	Now, due to the fact I write big ( > 1/4 MByte source code ) programs
	I use a different package and sigh whistfully when after 2 mins compile
	time I get a "Excuse me - you shoulda puta semi-c in here" error.

	Please do not start a dsicussion of which editors people use ...
	there's been a long-running one in comp.sys.mac and *boy* was it boring
	This is just to point out that, given the right machine, intelligent
	editors are *nice*. (please, someone, a C-editor like this ...)

Graham Wills         |  "I climb up to a mountain ...
TCD, Ireland.        |   I chop it down with the ledge of my hand."