Important Features and Alternative Samterms

[pete@minster.york.ac.uk]

This is to some extent prompted by the "creeping featurism" debate, and is
as much an attempt to straighten out in my own mind what _is_ Sam-like and
what isn't... I would say the _key_ features of Sam are (in roughly the order
I exploit them):

*	its regular expression handling
*	the distributed editing paradigm it implements
*	easy multi-file operation

Most of the discussions on this list, though, are about particular
user-interface features of samterm, when, theoretically, anything which can
talk to a Sam running on a remote host could be a samterm -- it just so
happens that at present the only samterms in existence are near-clones of
the original... 

Now enter the realms of heresy:

It seems to me that it should be possible for, say, someone using a Mac
or a PC with appropriate networking software to build a front-end to
Sam which conforms to all the usual user-interface conventions on their
particular machine (the full horrors of pull-down menus, appalling
widgetry and even, God forbid, dialogue boxes) yet still speaks the
same protocol as samterm. Not that I'd want to use them!

Since the most common complaint on this list seems to be that newcomers
"love the regular expressions but hate the user interface" or similar,
perhaps samterms with more familiar interfaces might be the way to
tempt newcomers into the Sam world; perhaps after using such
"presentational suger" for a while they might realise that Rob's
original is quite a lot more elegant than the baroque junk that
Windows/Mac/Motif etc. place in the way of the user...

pete
--
 Peter Fenelon - Research Associate - High Integrity Systems Engineering Group,
 Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York, Y01 5DD +44 (0)904 433388
 EMAIL: pete@minster.york.ac.uk ``Art is a science with more than 7 variables''