Re: [TUHS] Old screen editors

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Clem Cole

    > Ward had a nice history here:  TecoEditor
    > <http://c2.com/wiki/remodel/?TecoEditor> - worth reading

Yeah, pretty good. A couple of minor points:

"TECO Madness -- a moment of convenience, a lifetime of regret" - I
have seen this attributed to Dave Moon.

"the [ITS] version of TECO was used by Richard Stallman to implement the
original Emacs Editor" - accurate if read _just_ the right way, but incorrect
in the 'naive' reading.

Stallman didn't _originate_ the body of stuff that eventually turned into ITS
EMACS, although he did take over maintenance of it once it was rolling; and
later wrote Gnu Emacs from scratch himself.

The mostly accurate one-line history is the one given in Dan Weinreb's blog
"the original (TECO-based) Emacs was created and designed by Guy L. Steele
Jr. and David Moon. After they had it working, and it had become established
as the standard text editor at the AI lab, Stallman took over its
maintenance", to which Moon added "in all fairness I have to say that
Stallman greatly improved Emacs after he 'liberated' it from Guy and me".
More people were involved than Moon, Steele and Stallman, though; a lot of
people were writing stuff before Stallman took over; and even after that,
others (like Eugene Ciccarelli, a member of the CSR group) helped a lot with
ITS EMACS.

Stallman's EMACS paper ("sEMACS: The Extensible, Customizable,
Self-Documenting Display Editor") contains _many_ statements that are
_demonstrably_ wrong, e.g. "it is simply impossible to implement an extensible
system in [languages like PASCAL or C]" ... "This eliminates most popular
programming languages except LISP, APL and SNOBOL." Given that I've been using
a heavily customized Epsilon for decades, which is written completely in EEL
(a dialect of C enhanced with editing primitives like buffers, etc), that's
clerly very confused.

    Noel