nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) (09/06/89)
Well, after talking it over with my wife, I have decided not to remove the 64K limit on the size of the files editable by Freemacs. It just isn't important enough to me. Since I don't make a lot of money off of Freemacs copying fees, I don't have *that* incentive. I have looked at enhancing the .ASM code to edit files larger then 64K. This is pretty tough to do. When I started writing Freemacs back in '83, I targetted it for a 192K machine. When you write for a limited-resource environment, you make certain decisions that are more-or-less irrevokable. So it is with Freemacs. I could re-write it in C, and in fact, I have been trying to do so. I can see that it's a bigger job than I want to tackle. I'm not really interested in reinventing the "programmable editor-on-a-PC" wheel. At the time I wrote it, it was the only programmable editor on a MS-DOS machine. It was challenging. Now I'm faced with the prospect of implementing a Brief, or an Epsilon, or any one of the other thousands of programmable PC editors. I would rather apply my talents to something more original. Freemacs will not die so long as I am using it. I will continue to improve the MINT code and the .ASM code within the 64K file limit. There is still lots of memory space for MINT code, and I plan on using it. I am not happy with the state of the latest release, which was pushed out the door because I wanted to work on the >64K version. There are more GNU Emacs incompatibilities that I plan to eliminate. The next thing that I am going to do is add Boyer-Moore searching to the search algorithms. And, as always, I am always looking for user-written MINT code. -- --russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu])|(70441.205@compuserve.com)| (Russ.Nelson@f360.n260.z1.fidonet.org)|(BH01@GEnie.com :-)