Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> OK, I guess what I was really asking is why it's still considered the 
> most powerful editor *today*.

  There aren't many text editors even today that reach the same level
of expressiveness.

  Most software development IDEs have editors that do a lot of things
(like syntax highlighting and such) but are not even nearly as powerful
as emacs. (The most annoying thing that they usually lack is the same
kind of autoindentation as emacs has had for centuries.)

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                                                          - Warp

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>> Riiiiight. Tell me, how do I
>
> Use your brain?

I fail basic English. :'{

>> TeX does not "understand" colour or graphics.

> indeed. Lots of packages to handle the most diverse needs. A reasonable
> on-line index and books with examples.

Like I say, after hacking away at it for years, they've got it to 
sort-of work, most of the time. That's not the same as TeX *actually* 
supporting these things.

>> The system is still fragile, however. Literally, the colour changing
>> commands are classified as "fragile" LaTeX commands, and you're supposed
>> to use /protect and so forth. If you, for example, change colour in a
>> section heading, that works fine in the section heading, but breaks in
>> the table of contents and page running headings.
>
> If you mean that you wanted to change global behaviour in a heading, you
> deserve nothing better than a broken output.

No. If you just want to change the colour of one word in a seciton 
heading. Pretty easy with CSS (you can even have it apply only to the 
section heading and not the TOC listing, for example), but does evil 
things to TeX.

>> Oh, and I forgot to mention hyperlinks. But then, TeX is for /printing/,
>> primarily, so that's excusible.
>
> I think I have even seen those.

Yes. They're kludged in the same way as colour and graphics.

>>> It most certainly does. Style files are are at the heart of the system.
>>
>> Sure. In theory.
>>
>> Now suppose that for some reason I wanted all the document to come out
>> in a different typeface for some reason. The body text, section
>> headings, table of contents, figure captions, everything. Do you have
>> any idea how intractibly difficult that is?
>
> Bloody easy. My theses was in Garamont (IIRC my student decide that 9.5
> points would be ideal). Noticed that too late in the process to change
> it to something

...something...? Perhaps it is not only me that fails English. ;-)

>> Click a few of the stylesheets. Watch the entire page radically
>> transform instantly. TeX can't do that. (Recent versions of Word almost
>> can... but don't expect it to work properly.)
>
> ?? LaTeX can, haven't used plain TeX enough to have noticed any
> instances where it didn't work. Unless instantly is your operative word.

If I decided, for some insane reason, that I wanted section headings to 
be set vertically in the margin rather than how a sane person would set 
them... well, technically it's /possible/, but it would be damned /hard/ 
to do it.

>>> If you mean debugging your text or layout, that is more simple than in a
>>> wysiwyg editor.
>>
>> The page breaks look just fine. Then I write some more text, and the
>> page breaks move. Wuh?
>
> Yes, what did you expect else? Somewhere I have this nagging feeling
> that you try to treat TeX as a something similar to Word. Just a program
> to convert raw text to nice output.

Well, that's what it *is*. It's a program that converts your markup into 
something that looks nice.

(Word, of course, is more about *editing* text than actually making it 
look good...)

It's just baffling when a seemingly unrelated change causes part of the 
page flow to change for the worse. Or when you say "put this figure 
HERE" so LaTeX puts it five pages later. Or whatever.

>> Do you have any idea how much trouble I had trying to get it so that any
>> text put inside a "tabbing" environment comes out green? In the end I
>> was forced to give up. It just WILL NOT work consistently.
>
> You mean messing with the standard tabbing environment or when creating
> a new green environment.
>
>> If this was HTML I was talking about, changing the colour of one block
>> of text would be laughably simple. But TeX just can't handle it.
>
> Correction: you can not handle it. If I understood what you wanted to
> accomplish, I might feel tempted to try.

I merely wanted to create a new tabbing environment where all the text 
comes out green, set one quad in from both margins. (Apparently there's 
no way to prevent it flowing off the right edge of the page though...)

First I found that only the /first/ line came out green. So then I added 
a group around the body. That worked fine... until the environment went 
over a page break, at which point it broke again. Not to mention that by 
flipping from page to page, I actually managed to break the DVI viewer 
as well. (At one point the entire document turned green, just by me 
manipulating the view...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 04/08/2011 10:16 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> OK, I guess what I was really asking is why it's still considered the
>> most powerful editor *today*.
>
>    There aren't many text editors even today that reach the same level
> of expressiveness.
>
>    Most software development IDEs have editors that do a lot of things
> (like syntax highlighting and such) but are not even nearly as powerful
> as emacs. (The most annoying thing that they usually lack is the same
> kind of autoindentation as emacs has had for centuries.)

Interesting. Every IDE I've seen has had an autoindent feature that you 
can't turn *off*. (Which is annoying, because usually it works 
incorrectly...)

Anyway, I'm still not seeing the "not nearly as powerful" bit. Emacs 
lets you change stuff yourself. Most editors and IDEs aren't so 
flexible. That's the only difference I can see currently.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 8/4/2011 12:26, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> None of these are exactly "small" or "obscure" or "primarily for Linux". And
> yet, no COM.

Well, there's another reason people rage about IE still being popular for 
intranet purposes. It's because people writing the new browsers ignore the 
environment they're in.

The problem with COM is that it's not something you can really paste on 
after the fact. If your system isn't very Model-view-controller, it's hard 
to make it interface with a COM interface.

> But in trying to come up with a list... yeah, most of the stuff I have is
> FOSS, which probably explains why no COM.

That and people who are doing firefox development don't *expect* you to use 
it in an automated way, or they expect you to automate it solely thru 
javascript.

Anyone building something for a *business* to use is going to use COM for 
the interface on Windows.

> Now, aside from that matter, the thing which really puzzles me is this: If
> something *does* support COM, how the hell do you *use* it?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366757%28VS.85%29.aspx


-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Actually, I notice the same artifact here as I did with "fill mode". In 
> that mode, whenever you finish typing something, Emacs wraps it at 70 
> characters for you. Which is nice and all, but you know what? As I'm 
> typing this post right now, Thunderbird is going the same thing 
> /interactively/. It doesn't wait until I've stopped typing and than 
> rearrange all my text. It arranges it as I type, so I can immediately 
> see what the result will be like.

  I hate text editors that do some kind of automatic line splitting without
asking (especially if you can't turn the feature off). I like emacs because
it doesn't change anything in the file you open unless you explicitly ask
it to. You can open a *binary* file in emacs, save it, and it will be
identical to the original. The same cannot be said from most other text
editors (especially in Windows) which do tons of "smart" things automatically
(such as convert newline characters, unprintable characters, etc.)

  In fact, thanks to this property, you can use emacs as a hex editor.
It has a built-in hex-editing mode. (Yes, some other text editors have
that too. Not many, though.)

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                                                          - Warp

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On 8/4/2011 14:17, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Well, that's what it *is*. It's a program that converts your markup into
> something that looks nice.

Technically, it's a program that converts your mark up into a bunch of empty 
boxes that would look nice if you filled them in with the right fonts and 
such. It's stuff like dvi2ps that actually creates something that looks nice.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 8/4/2011 14:16, Warp wrote:
> (The most annoying thing that they usually lack is the same
> kind of autoindentation as emacs has had for centuries.)

The one time I got good at emacs was the time I needed better auto-indenting 
than I could get from a filter at the time. :-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   Can you do it in a text terminal through ssh? Can you customize the
> functionality, change it, add new features or modify existing ones? Can
> you run it on Windows, Linux, MacOS X, BSD, Solaris, and basically any
> Unix-style OS in existence? Can you get that software for free?

  Oh, and another thing: You can do the work on a simple text file, meaning
that if you wanted, you could later edit the file with any other program you
like, rather than using a closed, proprietary file format that can only be
opened and edited with MS Office.

  Imagine if Photoshop only supported a closed proprietary image format to
do its job, rather than doing it on standard image file formats. Suddenly
Gimp would be a whole lot more desirable.

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                                                          - Warp

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On 8/4/2011 12:26, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Does POV-Ray support COM? Is Windows the primary development platform for
> POV-Ray? Exactly.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a batch-processing program to use 
COM for scripting. What would you script that you can't do from the command 
line?

> Does 7zip support COM? How about Firefox? Google Earth? Sketchup?

http://www.adamlock.com/mozilla/   Mozilla COM interface.

http://earth.google.com/comapi/  Google earth COM api. That wasn't even hard 
to find.

http://include.wutils.com/com-dll/constants/constants-SketchUp.htm
Sketchup COM interface.

> None of these are exactly "small" or "obscure" or "primarily for Linux". And
> yet, no COM.

And yet, no google fu. ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On 8/4/2011 13:01, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Anyway, point being, you can apply DbC to anything. It doesn't have to be OO.

Hmmmm. Not really.  I can't imagine how you'd apply it to old-school BASIC. 
Or C in any reasonable sense. (What would an invariant look like in C?)

Preconditions and postconditions apply to routines that have state. 
Invariants apply to routines that have state outside of the individual 
routines *and* which have instances. So none of those really apply to purely 
procedural or functional languages.

Exception management in the DbC way doesn't really apply to functional code.

> Emacs may be old and clunky, but to be fair, it worked perfectly out of the
> box.

It's a sad commentary when the normal state of software is "hey, I installed 
it, and it worked before I made any other changes!"

>>> Maybe it's "the best" in the same way as TeX. The output of TeX is quite
>>> simply the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
>>
>> Hopefully they've improved it. TeX is probably OK as long as you don't
>> use it with metafont files, but the output with metafont is pretty sucky.
>
> I don't get what's "sucky" about Metafont. (Other than that nobody uses
> bitmap fonts anymore unless they really have to...)

The spacing sucks. The weight sucks. I'd have to show you two identical 
pieces of text, one set with metafont, one set on a real typesetter, for you 
to easily see the difference. But it's quite as much there as the jaggies on 
a 300DPI print-out compared to a 1200DPI print-out.

> With Unix, you can decide to use a completely different filesystem that you
> just made up, you can change the thread scheduling algorithm, and then you
> can change the implementation of the ARP cache from a hashtable to a linked
> list. None of which is possible with Windows.

That's not UNIX. That's Linux, and it's because you have the source code, 
not because it's UNIX. And yes, Windows you can use a completely different 
file system you just made up. And you can probably change the other stuff 
too - it just costs more.  And given that TCP/IP is an optional driver, I'd 
be very surprised to find you couldn't load your own version of that too if 
you wanted.

Kernel scheduling? Not so much, agreed.

But that sort of stuff isn't what I think of when I think of a "flexible" 
OS. I think of being able to do things flexibly, not the ability to change 
the source code because I happen to have the source code. I think of the 
ability to do things I couldn't do otherwise if the OS didn't have support 
or hooks for it.

> I have never, ever seen Linux crash unless I did something wrong. (E.g., it
> crashes because I just told it to format a device that's currently mounted.)
> My first Windows XP laptop crashed WITHIN 14 SECONDS of first being turned
> on. Didn't even finish the setup wizzard.

I've seen plenty of Linux crashes. You just didn't run it on flakey hardware 
like you did your XP, for example. (Or you just had a corrupted copy on your 
HD.)  Do you really think everyone who bought that laptop had it crash 
within 15 seconds of turning it on the first time?

> That said, over the years Windows has become more reliable. Our Windows
> servers basically never crash. I have to reboot them for some reason long
> before they fail.

Right.  Windows gets crufty if you keep dicking with it, basically.

> Still, if I was going to run, like, a nuclear enrichment program, I wouldn't
> want to use Windows. The malware implications alone would be... oh, wait.

No, I wouldn't used closed-source software for anything safety critical if I 
could avoid it.

> And Ctrl+B ("beginning") is already "back". And Ctrl+F ("first") is already
> "forward"...

That's exctly the problem with mnemonics.

> Well, yeah, I don't tend to open up a text editor and then press random key
> combinations to see if it activates a special feature I didn't know about.

Control right-arrow is a "random key combination"?

You know that holding shift while you move the cursor selects things too, right?

>>> (But then again, it's not exactly a feature you'd bother looking for.)
>>
>> Of course it is, especially if you're editing text.
>
> Can you give one single example of where you'd want to do this rather than,
> say, just jab the arrow key a few times?

Where I would want to search in a text file to find a word? You're kidding 
me, right?

I have the output from compiling a bunch of programs. The file is 4000 lines 
long. What was the command line used to compile firefox_scrollbar.c?

Heck, I have all the names and addresses in a text file. I want to look up 
my brother's fax number.

I have a program that's several screens long. I want to find everywhere the 
function LookForMe is used.

> I'm kinda surprised that there doesn't seem to be a "go to line 287"
> command. I mean, you can go to the top and then move down 287 lines. No,
> wait, that would take you to line 288. ARGH! >_<

There probably is. It was just an example.

>>> There's a section on "when Emacs is hung". What, you're actually
>>> expecting that to happen?
>>
>> If you're writing your own code, or you hand it a few megabytes and say
>> "go indent this".
>
> Wait, your own code can crash Emacs?

No, but it can hang emacs for long enough that you think it's crashed.

> Generally you don't expect, say, Firefox to die just because you feed it
> some bad JavaScript.

It doesn't, nor does emacs. That's why ctrl-G works, you see. Why do you 
think "interrupting my code where I accidentally wrote an infinite loop" is 
equivalent to "crashing emacs"? It's not crashed exactly *because* you can 
interrupt it.

> A typical editor session generally involves lots of typing, maybe a bit of
> scrolling, and periodically saving. So you'd expect the commands for editing
> and scrolling to be quick, as well as the command for saving.

You don't write a lot of code, do you? :-)

> These are all pretty rare, really.

I think it depends on what you do with an editor. :-) They're all pretty 
common for me.

> And break compatibility with all the extensive library of code written for
> Emacs! :-D

The code for emacs doesn't get invoked thru the keyboard mappings, any more 
than the code for COM does.

> Fun thing: Open Firefox. Press F3. Start typing. It highlights the first
> match it finds, as you type. By pressing Next and Prev, you can make it
> select other matches. But it does /not/ highlight *all* of them at once. I
> haven't seen anything except Emacs do that.

vim and visual studio both do. I don't use much else besides those three.

> Last time I invoked Vi, I had to reboot the PC to get out of it again.

If the last time you ran vi was before windows had close boxes on them, I 
can understand why you might be nervous.

Did you try reading a tutorial first?

>  From what I can gather, Emacs was amoung the very first editors that let
> you SEE WHAT YOU'RE EDITING, and do this AT THE SAME TIME AS YOU EDIT IT.
> The other editors were apparently like that awful "sed" thing. I can see how
> this would be regarded as a massive leap forward.

Nah. emacs didn't work on hard-copy terminals, which were still the dominant 
way of interacting with computers for a long time. As soon as tubes were 
common, so were visual editors.

> Being able to view multiple files simultaneously on a VT100 would have been
> a significant technical achievement. It seems Emacs basically invented the
> multiple document interface / tabbed editing / whatever you want to call it.

I'll grant you that one. :-)

> Being able to invoke all your tools from within your editor and edit their
> output is again quite a powerful idea.

vi had that too, except it was *all* your tools, with no need to write 
macros to handle it.

> Visual Studio is an IDE. It works for (say) C++. But if I decided I wanted
> it to work for Haskell... tough. Cannot be done.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=67496

Guess how the IDE interacts with it?  COM!

 > Not unless you hire a vast
> army of C++ programmers to write the necessary hooks and DLLs and God only
> knows what else to add the support to VS.

Uh, one Bulgarian intern, on the weekends.

> My current editor is SciTE. It supports many, many file formats. But Haskell
> is not one. I would have to compile it from source to add Haskell syntax
> highlighting (since none of the existing lexers are remotely similar, so I
> would have to add a new one).

Or you could use vim and haskell mode and see if it works.

http://projects.haskell.org/haskellmode-vim/

> I think there is probably still a place in the world for some kind of engine
> which is so configurable that you can build a complete development
> environment with it, for any conceivable target, without having to do really
> heavy stuff like writing low-level C code or compiling huge codebases from
> scratch.

That's exactly why Microsoft invented COM, IBM invented REXX, standards 
bodies invented COBRA, etc etc etc.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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