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From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,comp.editors
Subject: Re: UNIX needs a real text editor
Message-ID: <2384@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 24 Mar 89 23:51:41 GMT
References: <222@imspw6.UUCP> <252@torch.UUCP> <2112@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com> <743@stag.UUCP> <5620@cognos.UUCP>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.misc
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 45

In article <5620@cognos.UUCP> emoffatt@cognos.UUCP (Eric Moffatt) writes:
>In article <743@stag.UUCP> trb@stag.UUCP ( Todd Burkey ) writes:
>>In article <2112@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com> loo@mister-curious.sw.mcc.com (Joel Loo) writes:
>>>
>>How do other programmers/hackers out there feel about the need for
>>higher level programming editors/tools? Are you completely happy with
>>
>used to spend lunches discussing a C editor which worked on the parse tree
>and not "TEXT". It really seemed like a good idea, things like "copy IF
>statement (or FOR, WHILE...)" as well as "rename global var" etc. not
>
>Text is just the method we use to describe the things we want the machine
>to do. It's not neccessarily the best way, I would gladly use a "visual
>Programmer" (if I could find one !!).

Lemme look....

Here it is.  Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN Software Engineering
Symposium on Practical Software Development Envirionments (last November
in Boston, well, Cambridge, actually.)

Nertz.  Well.  There's a lot of stuff in the proceedings about environments
and some object-oriented visualization software, but not the one I wanted.

I remember at least one of the demonstrations was of a product being
built by a british company that iconifies the whole process.  You use
the mouse to pick and place functional elements (decision-diamond,
output-dingus, control-flow-arrow, that sort of thing) as though you
were editing the flow diagram, then you put the mouse in one of the
blocks and type a few statements or expressions to finish defining its
meaning.  It means essentially that you don't have to think in terms of
a broad, swooping flow structure and then cut and paste it into a
vertical strip of code; you can put a spaghetti of arrows and blocks
all over the window and the software will take care of the coding.

It seems to do for high-level languages what high-level languages did
for assembly, and assembly for machine-level coding...

I can't remember the name of the company, and I think I've lost their
brochures.  Sorry.  They were heavily geared towards ADA, anyway.  They
all were.  That's where the easy, no-real-strings-attached money is
going to in the military-industrial-software-simplex these days.

				--Blair
				  "Simpletonex, you mean..."