From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Newsgroups: fa.editor-p
Title: 
Article-I.D.: ucb.1252
Posted: Thu Jun  3 02:26:24 1982
Received: Fri Jun  4 03:48:54 1982

>From RMS@MIT-AI Thu Jun  3 02:24:17 1982
I do not think it is worth while to waste effort on minor rearrangements
of code in EMACS to make it run faster in the 2080.

For one thing, CPU time is clearly less important when you have a faster
machine.  If EMACS runs twice as fast anyway, who cares about an extra 1 percent.

FOr another, there will still be plenty of KLs and 2020s which might be slowed
down by some of the things that would speed up the 2080.  And slowness on
the 2020 is more important because it is slower to start with.

As for ^S and ^Q, I do not believe that there is any reason at all to regard
this protocol as inevitable.  All the desirable terminals that have come
out recently work fine without the use of that totally inferior protocol
for flow control.  If you have a network that uses ^S and ^Q for flow control,
you can encode the data sent over it so that all characters can be sent.

I do not see how the idea of a key labelled "search" has anything to do with
this question.  Keys do not come from nowhere by magic.  You can play musical
key labels all you like but that does not create more codes.  The only way
is to start using multi-character sequences.  Once you can do that, you can
just as easily manage to encode the data so you can transmit all of ASCII,
or all of the 9-bit EMACS character set, over a line that uses ^S-^Q flow control.
Instead of making a kludgy key labelled "search" send a multi-character
sequence, make the terminal send that same sequence when I type "s"
and hold down control; then make the computer turn that back into ^S so
my programs don't have to be changed.

A suitable encoding is: represent ^S by ^A S, ^Q by ^A Q, and ^A by ^A A.
This differs from most proposals for using the programmable function keys
that are found on terminals nowadays in one crucial respect:
there are no two sequences of keystrokes which produce the same input
sequence.