[comp.lang.icon] Text Processing

tenaglia@mis.mcw.edu ("Chris Tenaglia - 257-8765") (09/14/90)

We're running ICON 8 on VAX/VMS 5.2. VMS has RUNOFF for generating
documentation, and it has the same general look and feel of unix nroff.
It comes free with VMS as does EVE/TPU.

DECs EVE/TPU is another tool, which is the Extensible Vax Editor,
and Text Processing Utility. It's a programmable editor. The TPU programming
language has many Icon ideas built into it, such as pattern matching,
csets, alternation. The code even has a vaguely iconish appearance. However,
it doesn't have goal oriented processing, generators, and the data types
are very strict. Since it's an editor, the data types are editor oriented
such as buffer, range, process, window, line, pattern. There are also hundreds
of built in functions and global system variables and keywords.

I have a highly customized version of the editor. It does a lot of WYSIWYG
wordprocessor tricks. I have written Icon utilities to do pagination, table
of contents, and indeces on documentation I've written. This allows my
master doc files to be much more human readible than if I coded them in
RUNOFF. For table of contents and indexing I've had to use a little sleight
of hand to have the items I want retrieved match a certain pattern, yet look
unobtrusive.

It's not terribly fancy or postscript, but it's cheap and effective given
our hardware.

Chris Tenaglia (System Manager)
Medical College of Wisconsin
8701 W. Watertown Plank Rd.
Milwaukee, WI 53226
(414)257-8765
tenaglia@mis.mcw.edu, mcwmis!tenaglia