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Aucbvax.5101 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Wed Nov 11 01:06:57 1981 Text Formatting >From CHILENSKAS@USC-ISIE Tue Nov 10 23:38:44 1981 I agree that this seems to be the right place to discuss integrating editors into various other portions of the system such as text formatting, program formatting and compilation, etc. The representations one uses for text can make it hard or impossible to use current (or desirable) editors on that text. Integrating editors into mail systems and the programming cycle is another area that requires thought for representation and program interfacing. It is relatively nice to have a command to switch back and forth between the editor and compiler, but it would be nicer to do incremental compiling or interpreting during the edit session itself. IBM was suppose to have such a system for COBOL, FORTRAN and 370 BAL back in 1975 but the people at Olin who evaluated it said that the COBOL interface was clumsy. It took lots of time per statement and still did not catch a lot of errors. The error messages flashing at you were distracting to the main task of programming. In text editing there is the question of "what you see is what you get" - obviously impossible on a typical one font terminal if what you are really doing is typesetting. Where are the reasonable compromises? Which of these compromises are likely to change as hardware gets cheaper? With work stations? These are the kinds of questions i had hoped to hear addressed when i joined the list. R Mark Chilenskas Chilenskas@ISIE -------

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