From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: Re: evaluating editors Article-I.D.: ucb.1250 Posted: Thu Jun 3 01:18:35 1982 Received: Thu Jun 3 05:52:54 1982 >From Mishkin@YALE Thu Jun 3 01:14:55 1982 I fully sympathize with your painful experience trying to bring up bogus software. In case it is still not clear: Z runs on unmodified TOPS-20 systems as well as on our own modified monitor. I completely agree with you that exporting (or "exporting") software which has bizarre monitor dependencies is totally unacceptable. I can not comment on earlier generations of Yale hackers from which the present Tools (incl. Z) work is totally divorced. However, we have strived very hard to make our software robust and exportable. Every single tool we send out is documented. All our code is written in a high level language (Bliss; higher than MACRO anyway) and uses a shared runtime library. Z is terminal independent and it is very easy to add new terminal types to Z since it uses a termcap-like facility (i.e. it uses terminal descriptor files). In characterizing our "isolation" I should have mentioned that, to a certain extent, in retrospect we consider this a boon: had we been on the net, we probably would have absorbed that large set of random programs written in MACRO instead of developing a coherent set of utilities and a environment for writing them. -- Nat