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Aucbvax.4732 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Tue Oct 27 20:48:11 1981 small machines 1) Secondary storage for the temp file is NOT a severe problem. If the editors he's seen are slow, it is because they are poorly implemented. Rare indeed is the program which is truly I/O bound, and the general programming quality in text editors I have seen has not always been good. A carefully designed I/O implementation can leave the bottlenecks in the algorithms instead of the disk. For example, Unix ed's I/O provides nearly instantaneous response to most commmands. (Its not being a state of the art editor by his criterion is irrelevant to issues of buffer management.) 2) Micros are NOT hard to program. Some machines have comfortable environments, and those that don't offer nothing that I would want to edit anyway.

----- Mail saved at Mon Oct 26 21:22:49 1981 Subject: small machines dlw@MIT-AI is wrong on both counts: 1) Secondary storage for the temp file is NOT a severe problem. If the editors he's seen are slow, it is because they are poorly implemented. Rare indeed is the program which is truly I/O bound, and the general programming quality in text editors I have seen has not always been good. A carefully designed I/O implementation can leave the bottlenecks in the algorithms instead of the disk. For example, Unix ed's I/O provides nearly instantaneous response to most commmands. (Its not being a state of the art editor by his criterion is irrelevant to issues of buffer management.) 2) Micros are NOT hard to program. Some machines have comfortable environments, and those that don't offer nothing that I would want to edit anyway.

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