xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) (09/27/90)
While the need for an editor that can deal with a file larger than memory may be rare, for a developer it is often crucial. Since I learned my debug habits three decades ago, I tend to do a lot of debug printing. Capturing a detailed debug trace to a file, and then using an editor for the convenient search and reformat capabilities, is an effective technique when the problem is hidden somewhere totally unknown in a long execution. Working in the MS/DOS universe, I was delighted with a privately developed, incredibly capable editor that let me edit a 3.5 megabyte debug trace without a hiccup in the available 340K RAM data space, and find a problem that had eluded me for days in about an hour and a half. Anyone designing an Amiga editor should look into 1) limiting its real memory use in any case to avoid adverse impact on other multitasking programs, 2) giving the user explicit command line control of maximum memory use, so that when nothing else is going on, RAM can be sacrificed for speed, and 3) developing a paradigm of execution modeling virtual memory in software with even secondary memory management for overflowing cut and paste buffers, so that file editing is limited by disk, rather than RAM, size. Kent, the man from xanth. <xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>