Re: GNU ex (an enhanced version of GNU ed)

[John Cowan]

Andrew L. Moore scripsit:

> I have mostly tracked the patches for ed(1) that come from the BSD's.
> I am not aware of any in the GNU/Linux distributions.  It was once
> proposed that ed(1) be invoked for the ed mode of nvi(1).  The problem
> is in integrating the I/O and buffer handling of two diverse approaches.

'ed' and 'ex' are really pretty different in detail, though, as I found
when I tried to use 'ed -p :' directly as my editor.  Hence my current
effort.

Any source code you'd care to send me I'd love to have.

> As it stands, nvi(1) does a poor job of emulating ed(1).

Fair enough, since it was never intended to do so.

> But, if nvi(1) could be modified for GNU distribution, that would be
> my choice.

A reasonable approach, but it sacrifices the small/fast property of 'ed',
which is one of the things I like about it.  Furthermore, I worked with
the code of the Software Tools (in ratfor) editor years ago, and I still
remember it pretty well, it turns out.

-- 
John Cowan  address@hidden  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc,
informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
        --Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming (rules 1-9 are unknown)