From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from minster.york.ac.uk ([144.32.128.41]) by hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu with SMTP id <24092>; Tue, 25 Jan 1994 06:55:55 -0500 From: pete@minster.york.ac.uk Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 06:39:49 -0500 Message-ID: To: sam-fans@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu Subject: Important Features and Alternative Samterms 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''