EVERHART@arisia.dnet.ge.com (Glenn Everhart 215 354 7610 Everhart%Arisia.dnet.ge.com) (01/04/91)
Actually, when one types "edit" to TECO at the command prompt (and follows it by two ESCapes), the result is an error ?IIA Illegal insert arg rather than random deletion. Now, if one entered text like "hdit", it would delete the whole buffer and insert a "t" character. TECO is very terse, but only executes commands after a pair of escapes are entered. Also, double bell (^G) can abort a partly typed command string to prevent damage. For TECOphiles, I converted tecoC to an .lzh file and uploaded tecocsrc.lzh to abcfd20.larc.nasa.gov. It needs to be compiled with SAS C 5.10, which I have not yet done. TecoC represents a very significant effort by Pete Siemsen to build a portable TECO for numerous platforms, and has essentially the whole language, compatible with teco-11. (Incidentally, teco-11 is a direct descendant of teco-8 which was a program written at OMSI a long time back, ported (apparently by almost direct transliteration) to pdp11, and subsequently ported to VAX, again partly by automated translation. Many additions and enhancements were made along the way, so the thing has little to do either with the old DEC Tape Editor and Corrector or with MIT TECO. Pete's efforts are basically a total restart, in C this time, but with the goal of implementing the same command set as Teco-11, with a few odds and ends from teco-10 and teco-20 where they make sense. Incidentally, how many of you know that DDT originally stood for Digital Debugging Tape (from an old pdp1 manual (yes, pdp ONE) I saw in the RSX suite at the LV DECUS meeting.)? An old hacker's question is "what does your name do in TECO?" since the language started out with single character commands, got overloaded with features, used most of the characters on the keyboard, overloaded them, and started adding multiple character commands and command modifiers, so a compressed and uncommented TECO program looks very like line noise. Once your fingers know TECO, though, you can make formatting changes in programs with incredible speed with that tool. Glenn Everhart