>>>>> On 27 Jan 93 00:13:22 GMT, pop@cs.umass.edu ( Robin Popplestone ) said:
> There is an improved version of the EMACS - POPLOG interface which was done
> here by Gordon Dakin. This "knows" that POPLOG has 4 languages (not a
> natural concept to EMACS). I did send it across the Atlantic some time ago,
> but don't know if it will be in contrib for 14.2. It will work in
> conjunction with XVED to give access to help files
Yes, we have a copy here at Birmingham which I find pretty good. The one
thing that an emacs interface to pop11 lacks at the moment (there may well
be more than one) is an interface to the debugger. This excellent and very
useful tool, can `sort-of' be used within a pop immediate mode within emacs,
but you can't display the source at the same time. A real drag.
>(I don't know why people like EMACS but they do...)
Why does anyone like anything? It is a subjective issue, based upon all
sorts of non directly related things. Personally I came across micro emacs
years ago (it was the only editor on our system), and after using that for
some time GNU emacs came along and I switched over to that (it was the
natural move to make), and have been using it ever since.
I did spend some time on a VMS machine, so obviously started using eve which
is a very powerful editor, but soon found a clash between it and my emacs
knowledge, so was glad when I could give it up and go back to unix.
With emacs, it is the same as anything, as more people invest more time and
effort producing more and more modes for it, its usefulness grows and grows.
The result is that at the moment emacs may be far from perfect, but I know it
very well, and don't see the point of converting to another editor like ved
that may be better in some ways but worse in others. This is subjective of
course, but so are likes and dislikes.
If I am going to learn a new editor, then I would tend to want to learn
something like sam, the plan 9 editor, which philosophically speaking
represents the way forward for editors. It is very small and fast and highly
integrated to its applications.
It is amusing to point out that in fact I have had to learn a little ved,
not only to get around the debugger problem, but also in order to
demonstrate pop11 to MSC students. Mind you when I have to go and help them
with a problem, and I try and use their set up, I have to ask things like
"Can you remind me how to mark this line" etc...
Tim
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Tim Read, Email: tmr@cs.bham.ac.uk, The Attention and Affect Project
Room LG23, School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham,
B15 2TT, England, Phone: +44-(0)21-414-4766, Fax: +44-(0)21-414-4281
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