Beebe@SCIENCE.UTAH.EDU ("Nelson H.F. Beebe") (02/03/89)
I am a long-time user of TOPS-20 Emacs and GNU Emacs, and have written well over 10K lines of TECO (Text Editor and COrrector) library code in the form, and about 4K lines of ELISP library code for the latter. For library code, I'd much rather write in ELISP than TECO, but for short, often context-sensitive, editing jobs, I prefer TECO. A couple of years ago, I started a TECO interpreter in EEL (Epsilon Extension Language), a C-like language used in the fine (Emacs-like) Epsilon editor on PC DOS. I also wrote an extensive tutorial manual (in LaTeX) on TECO arranged to let the reader "learn TECO in N easy lessons". I ran out of time, and enthusiasm for 4.77MHz PCs, and never finished completely debugging it. Most of it works, and there is a TECO debugger included with it. I hoped to get a faster PC, and more time, to finish it off, then transfer the code (by a reasonably fast manual translation) from EEL to ELISP, making it available for GNU Emacs users, but regrettably, neither of those wishes has materialized. Perhaps there are some people out there who would like to begin a collaborative effort to complete this project, first on Epsilon, then with GNU Emacs. If so, please contact me, and I will arrange to make my work available as a starting point. Naturally, on completion of such a project, the copyleft would be assigned to the Free Software Foundation for the betterment of programmerkind. I don't believe what we want here is a TECO as extensive as the ITS/TOPS-20 base of EMACS, which is a DEC-20 assembly language interpreter consisting of 23580 lines (722Kb) of source code, but rather a subset that is somewhere between the relatively small DEC TECOs (PDP-xx, VAX, DEC-10, and DEC-20), and the large set. The goal is not to port old TECO libraries from TOPS-20, but instead to make the power of TECO for small editing jobs easily available to the GNU Emacs user. TECO never had very good documentation, and users who have become accustomed to screen editors tend to say "why would you EVER want to program in THAT! UGH!". I believe my manual answers that question, and argues that for certain types of jobs, mostly those you can write down in less than 10 lines of TECO, you will indeed find it useful, and maybe even wonder how you lived without it. -------