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Aucb.282 fa.editor-p utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Tue Jan 12 20:43:57 1982

>From RMS@MIT-AI Tue Jan 12 20:30:33 1982 LAWS is mistaken in his statements about what EMACS users have to give up; from his claim, it would appear to follow that prefix characters cannot exist. Also, he displays an implicit belief that cross-product command languages cannot have self-inserting printing characters. Many people seem to think this, but it is not so.

Misconceptions such as these often come about from thinking of specific syntactic features of an editor command language only in the context in which they are seen to be used. For example, one may think of prefix characters as something relating to weird random I/O-like operations, because that is what the prefix character in EMACS's standard command set is for, and not realize that the "d" command in VI is also a prefix character.

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