Talk:Text Editor and Corrector
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[edit] TECO hype
From the "Standard TECO <nl> TEXT EDITOR AND CORRECTOR FOR THE <nl> VAX-11, PDP-11, PDP-10, and PDP-8 <nl> USER'S GUIDE AND LANGUAGE REFERENCE MANUAL" May 1985 Edition:
- "... a novice TECO user can begin creating and editing text files after only a few hours of instruction."
Which only goes to show how much things have improved. --Kop 17:39, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
[edit] TECO description on Emacs
Could a TECO user please reivew the description of TECO, circa 1976, as written at the top of Emacs#Emacs history? I've rewritten the paragaraph but have only looked at the 1985 manual and never used TECO. Thanks. --kop 00:22, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- Ye gods, I used TECO on the university computer, in Frankfurt, in 1980, to write my dissertation. (That was before anyone had heard of something called a 'personal computer.') Jeepers, 25 years ago.... I think I still have all the macros from back then - I mean: I wrote my own goddamn text editor... (that's for the nostalgia corner)
[edit] "Write-only": POV or not?
The Trivia section's description of TECO as a "Write-only" language strikes me as a tad biased. It should be NPOV-ified, or at least referenced. --Maru (talk) 20:19, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
- You've apparently never tried to read a TECO program. It's entirely a fact that most can't be read without a huge investment of time and effort. (And no, I'm not the editor who inserted that statament :-) ! )
- Atlant 13:07, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
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- But I'm sure you would have had no trouble understanding the following perfectly-clear TECO program:
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[1 J^P$L$$ J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K :L I $ G1 L>$$
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- Atlant 14:16, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Whose Building 26 are we talking about?
The current History paragraph refers to two MIT PDP-1 computers housed in DEC's Building 26. Isn't this in error? To my knowledge, DEC buildings were not numbered. RLE had a PDP-1 computer, and perhaps TMRC had one also. Most early PDP-1 hackers were TMRC members. The RLE machine was in MIT's Building 26 (or possibly 24) on the second floor, next door to the TX-0, to which it had a kludgy data connection. TMRC was in Building 20, and it's thus likely that its PDP-1 would have been there also, but I don't remember seeing one there. I'm disinclined to make any correction to this aspect of the history until someone from MIT, preferably an old TMRC-er from RLE, steps forward.
Side note - FWIW, In a practical sense, TECO is generally write-only. By the time you have decoded someone else's TECO command string you could easily write your own version to do the same thing, probably better. I speak as someone who used TECO as recently as 1995, on a VAX no less, because it was too much trouble to do some random but fancy editing task any other way. Snezzy 05:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
- Buildings in DEC's Maynard Mill complex were numbered (and I spent time in Building 3 and Building 5), but IIRC, the numbering didn't go as high as 26, and even if there was a 26, it would have been an outpost like the Security building rather than any of the "real" buildings.
- So your supposition that this is an MIT building sounds a lot more like reality to me.
- Atlant 13:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] TECO as an editor
While I agree that TECO programs can be incomprehensible, TECO used as an editor wasn't that bad. I think it's comparable to editors like ed. I've added a section showing a simple TECO editing session so show this side of TECO. Alas, it's been over twenty years since I last used it for real, and can't find a copy to run right now, so I'm not 100% sure of the example. Of course, there are any number of ways to make any given change and this is only one of them. Jordan Brown 07:11, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
Got a copy of Tony Alma's TECO for Windows and tested that edit session; it's fine. Boy, that's a blast from the past. Jordan Brown 07:45, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
[edit] calculate pi with TECO
No discussion of TECO is complete without this program. I'm not sure it's really encyclopedic, but it is insane.
+0UN QN"E 20UN ' BUH BUV HK QN< J BUQ QN*10/3UI QI< \+2*10+(QQ*QI)UA B L K QI*2-1UJ QA/QJUQ QA-(QQ*QJ)-2\ 10@I// -1%I > QQ/10UT QH+QT+48UW QW-58"E 48UW %V ' QV"N QV^T ' QWUV QQ-(QT*10)UH > QV^T @^A/ /
I have no idea how it works, but it does. It defaults to calculating 20 digits, but you can ask for a different number by typing a number before the program, e.g. "100+0UN ...". (I think it's intended to be executed out of a Q-register, so that the number of digits is a straightforward parameter to the macro call. Unfortunately I don't remember how to put it into a Q-register or execute it from one.) Here's a few tidbits of how it works...
| +0UN | Add zero to the current value and store it in register N. |
| QN | Retrieve the value of register N |
| "E ... ' | Do this stuff if the value is equal to zero |
| 20UN | Store 20 into register N |
| B | Synonym for zero (usually used to refer to the start of the buffer) |
| UH | Store it in register H |
| BUV | Store zero in register V |
| H | Equivalent to B,Z: the entire buffer |
| K | Kill (so HK empties the buffer) |
| QN< ... > | Do the enclosed stuff as many times as register N says |
| ... The rest is left as an exercise for the reader ... | |
I'm pretty sure this program is at least 30 years old, since I saw it (or some other program that calculated pi in TECO :-) back when I was using TECO in ~1976.
I grabbed this from [2]. Nearby they have a PDP-10 simulator running TOPS-20...
Jordan Brown 08:27, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
- Here's more detail on PI.TEC: [3]. Among other things it mentions the author (Stan Rabinowitz) and even an academic journal article reference ([4]) on the subject. Paul Koning 16:02, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
