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From: page@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: DME
Message-ID: <1471@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu>
Date: Mon, 6-Jul-87 01:49:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: ulowell.1471
Posted: Mon Jul  6 01:49:27 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 6-Jul-87 06:59:24 EDT
References: <8706260802.AA10341@ingres.Berkeley.EDU> <1104@knopfler.munsell.UUCP>
Reply-To: page@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu (Bob Page)
Organization: University of Lowell
Lines: 55

I am a toolsmith and we are talking about religion here, although
this posting contains no heat!  Imagine!

hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Doug Merritt) wrote:
>DME destroys some white space information
>I don't think that editors should feel free to [do that].

klm@knopfler.UUCP (Kevin McBride) replied:
>If you don't like it, don't flame Matt, write your own editor.
>since you're not [paying for DME] you don't have much room to complain.

First, to Kevin and those netters who agreed with him -- an intrinsic
property of people who make tools (and share them) is that they want
as many people to use them as possible.  This goes for most software,
commercial or not.  I think Matt would rather have people say "I like
it but would like it more if it did this" rather than "I don't like it
and I'm not going to tell you why since it's your tool and you were
good enough to share it and it's not my right to complain about it"
or even "I love it, don't change a thing, it mirrors my mind exactly."

Secondly, to the net as a whole: what is life for if not to encourage
us to build better tools, in order that we can in turn build better
tools?  I say let's build great tools ... together if we can, alone
if we have to, but let's do it.

Thirdly, about editors - I agree with Doug on this one.  A text editor,
of ALL things, is too widely used by too many people for a designer
to envision all the possible uses.  It should be, among other things,
utterly predictable, and utterly safe with the text it is entrusted
with.  In the case of DME, I like the idea that Matt put in, but in
no way should it be the default - it should not even be settable
as a startup option, since the user will forget about it someday when
she goes to a new application of the editor (like editing uuencoded files).
Make it a menu selection or keyboard command or something.

Lastly, I have no interest in DME, and will not use it regardless of
the features that it has (no reflection on DME or Matt; I just don't
want to learn a new editor right now if it doesn't have any more power
than what I'm already using and can't run under Amiga, UN*X and VMS) --
but I was moved to reply to this exchange because a. it's bad to stifle
suggestions on how to make tools more usable, and b. text editors should
not automatically do ANYTHING to the text ``for'' me, and should not have
options to do so (automatically).  I would go to the extreme of saying that
if I create a file without a newline at the end, it should be written out
without a newline.  Almost no text editor passes this test (the editor I
use does, although there's a dastardly startup option to change this).

Remember SOS and TECO?  Everyone used their ``feature'' that you could
read in a file and write it back out -- even though you didn't tell the
editor to DO anything to the text, it would strip the extra CR's for you.
Handy but too dangerous for me.

..Bob
-- 
Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept.   page@ulowell.{uucp,edu,csnet}