From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!cmcl2!philabs!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!ee163cz
Newsgroups: net.flame
Title: matches
Article-I.D.: sdccsu3.390
Posted: Tue Mar 15 07:43:42 1983
Received: Tue Mar 22 20:01:55 1983


   A couple of days ago, I posted a request for a functional mail path,
including, incidentally, a minor gripe regarding Harpo.  Immediately,
my mailbox filled up with paths, and the net filled up with flames.  After
I had apologized to the poor Harpo machine, I suddenly realized...

   All this quarter, I've been trying to stir up some outrage by poking fun
at religion (well, on and off), to no avail.  A fairly harmless request
for information gets flames.   I'VE DONE IT!   I've found a subject
that annoys people!  I hereby retract the apology posted to net.followup!
I want net mail to be a UTILITY, not a hobby!  Furthermore:



   I hate vi:  All right, it's better than ed, but it's still a severely
brain-damaged editor.  I want to edit TEXT, usually in very simple ways,
and the stupid editor makes me type a bunch of COMMANDS!  A decent screen
editor would display a page of text, let me move the cursor around with
the cursor keys (it IS possible to translate incoming escape sequences;
perhaps some nice person at Access Technology would like to explain how
it's done) and type TEXT, in either insert or exchange mode.  Anything
fancier could be pushed off into a separate command mode, or (for *really*
rare commands) a different editor.  The switch to command mode (for a
single command) should be done with a function button.

   All the UN*X systems I've met handle typeahead in a very annoying way:
they echo characters as they are typed, rather than waiting for a program
to read them.  Come on, that sort of thing belongs in R*-11 and RD*S, not
a modern OS!  Considering how many programs there are that don't bother
to prompt, delaying the echo would be very helpful in determining whether
a program is in an infinite loop, or is expecting input, or is doing fine,
thank you, but the system is overloaded at the moment.  While I'm on the
subject of typeahead, I'd really like to have a way to kill the typeahead
buffer (I'm a lousy typist, and sometimes I lose track of how many characters
I've mistyped, or even change my mind after hitting return).  My HOME
computer has a kill-typeahead key (of course, I had to add that myself,
but then I had to add typeahead in the first place...); why doesn't this
vastly more expensive system have one?

   The rm command should have a prompting option: "rm -q *", for those times
when you need to delete about half your files and don't want to type their
names.  This would have the added benefit of *suggesting* that you delete
each file, thus making you think about it & maybe freeing up some more
disk space.  (If nobody's done this yet, maybe I'll write it myself when
I have some stray time & feel like doing some programming.  Watch net.sources
in a few months.)

   I don't much care for C:  Mainly, the precedences are screwy, and there are
too many special characters.  Typing in a C program requires extensive use of
the shift key; it also requires that I frequently leave the alphanumeric
portion of the keyboard and search for special characters which are probably
hidden somewhere bizarre if I'm not using my own terminal.  Also, I tend
(when not using C) to make extensive use of nested procedures, with the
inner procedure making use of the local variables of the outer (recursive)
procedure; this is very convenient for some sorts of programs, and frightfully
hard to denest.


                                Remind me to flame about keyboards sometime,
                                          Eric J. Wilner
                                        (AKA F. J. Gumby)
                                    ...!sdcsvax!sdccsu3!ee163cz