From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 29543 invoked from network); 29 Mar 2021 16:00:16 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 29 Mar 2021 16:00:16 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 486C89C882; Tue, 30 Mar 2021 01:59:53 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 329869C82B; Tue, 30 Mar 2021 01:59:39 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 182419C82B; Tue, 30 Mar 2021 01:59:37 +1000 (AEST) Received: from oclsc.com (oclsc.com [206.248.137.164]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with SMTP id F3F159C829 for ; Tue, 30 Mar 2021 01:59:35 +1000 (AEST) Received: by lignose.oclsc.org (Postfix, from userid 1000) id C66DF640CB6; Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:58:12 -0400 (EDT) To: tuhs@tuhs.org Message-Id: <20210329155812.C66DF640CB6@lignose.oclsc.org> Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 11:58:12 -0400 (EDT) From: norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson) Subject: Re: [TUHS] Remember the ed thread? X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" ed is the standard editor, they say. The b command (stands for browse) came from late-1970s U of T; rob probably brought it to 1127. There were a handful of other syntactic conveniences, like being allowed to leave off the final delimeter of an s command, and declaring that a missing address means 1 before the comma or semicolon and $ after, so 3,s/fish/&head works over all lines from 3 to the last, and , standing alone addresses the whole buffer. Also the idea that s followed by a digit N means start with the Nth instance of the pattern: s3/fish/&head/ affects only the third fish, and s3/fish/&head/g every fish after the second. I have all those tweaks, plus a few others, embedded in my fingers from the qed produced by the same Toronto hacks. I contracted it from the copy rob left behind at Caltech, which means it has been my editor of choice for 40 years now (with sam as an alternate favourite since its inception 35 years or so ago). That qed has a lot of cryptic programming stuff that I have mostly forgotten because it was never that useful, but what really hooked me was a. Multiple buffers, with the ability to move and copy text between them reasonably smoothly (both with the m and t commands and with an interpolate-into-input magic character); b. The > < | commands, which respectively send the addressed lines to a shell command (default ,), replace the addressed lines or append after the single addressed line the standard output of the shell command (default .), and replaced addressed lines with what you get by sending them (default ,) to the shell command, replacing them with its standard output. The last operators make qed into a kind of workbench, both for massaging data and for constructing a list of commands to send to the shell. I gather current Linux/BSD eds have > and <, spelled r ! and w !, but without | it just ain't the same, rather like the way | revolutionized the shell. I believe the credit for U of T ed and qed go mainly to Rob Pike, Tom Duff, Hugh Redelmeier, and the (alas now late) David Tillbrook. David remained an avid user of qed, continuing to add stuff to it. Norman Wilson Toronto ON PS: this message, as most of my e-mail, composed by typing it into qed, editing as needed, then running >mail tuhs@tuhs.org