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.