[comp.emacs] a TECO offer

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.
-------