Re: Input line editing

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost>]

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 11:51:58AM +0100, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
> Finally someone said it. :-)
>
> But the COMND% JSYS wasn't exactly just line editing. I could just wish  
> for COMND%, but that's not likely to happen. COMND% was more about  
> describing the structure of the line expected, so that completion could  
> be done on it. (TOPS-20 can to completion on everything, not just  
> filenames.)

If you want this on Unix, the 'ccmd' library from Columbia MM is probably
the easiest way to get it.

There are, though, three basic problems with ccmd:

1) It's more or less a translation from PDP-10 assembly into C.  Not so
   easy to maintain.

2) It's very large, despite #1.

3) It uses 8th-bit-stealing to encode state as it parses.  So it will
   never be able to deal with alternate character sets without a major,
   almost total, rewrite.

Thor