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Aucbvax.4866 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Sat Oct 31 20:43:05 1981 Re: Integrating Editors with Programming Languages >From HEDRICK@RUTGERS Sat Oct 31 20:34:54 1981 1) Almost all current implementations of Lisp include vectors, which allows for an arbitrary number of pointers without pay the factor of two penalty (which isn't present in the increasingly common CDR-coded implementation anyway). The following implementations of Lisp for DEC-20's have vectors or something equivalent: Maclisp, Interlisp, Elisp, and Standard Lisp

2) Even in primitive versions, "records" containing more than 2 objects appears to be about the most common data structure which people use. I programmed my thesis in Lisp, but have done mostly Pascal programming for the last 3 years or so. Thus I have a fair claim to know both styles of programming. I can only say that I do not recall any bugs due to attempting to refer to data structures incorrectly, but I know of a number of cases where I wanted to bypass Pascal's type checking and found it hard (though possible, if you know the compiler as well as I do) to do. Most people use macros rather than functions, since this allows them to be compiled in line.

3) I normally use TVEDIT to prepare pictures of the sort you are talking about. It allows you to move the cursor to any spot on the screen, even if that spot (because of end of line, or tab) did not exist before. Furthermore, it displays every character (even the control characters which we use for line drawing on our Xerox 9700) as taking one space. -------

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