Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!ncar!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!mimir!hugin!augean!idall
From: idall@augean.OZ (Ian Dall)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Origin of term "Emacs"
Keywords: Etymology, Emacs
Message-ID: <556@augean.OZ>
Date: 11 Aug 89 13:39:10 GMT
References: <2481@orion.cf.uci.edu> <57187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <44052@bbn.COM> <57212@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Engineering Faculty, University of Adelaide, Australia
Lines: 43
Reply-To:

In article <57212@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Lum Johnson  writes:
>In article <44052@bbn.COM> jr@bbn.com (John Robinson) writes:
>>In article <57187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, lum@armadillo (Lum Johnson) writes:
>
>>WYSIWYG with self-insertion and automatic redisplay came later with
>>EMACS.  I'm not saying it was the first to do this, but in the TECO
>>descendents I think it was.
>
>Actually, I think that visual redisplay may have just preceded Emacs,
>having been done in VTECO (although it wasn't automatic - you still
>needed to type ESC ESC to confirm and execute the command string),
>though I'm no longer sure.  The self-insertion of printing characters
>was a natural consequence of the dispatch vector support.

Well I am not certain of the dates but TECO definitely grew
sufficiently to allow WYSIWIG editing with the appropriate macros. In
fact I still have machine readable versions of VTEDIT.TEC which could
be arranged to be autoloaded with the right magic and definitely
allowed WYSIWIG editing with the ability to escape to execute extended
commands if required ( like ESC ESC in GNU emacs). VTEDIT.TEC was for
TECO-11 and I am not sure how the development of TECO-10 macros and
TECO-11 macros compared.

The VTEDIT.TEC is structured with "dispatch tables" which are rather like
keymaps (except much harder to change and not self documenting).

GNU EMACS shows some TECO heritage in its treatment of the buffer as a
collection of characters (as opposed to a collection of lines) and the
terms "point" and "dot" and the concept of registers. The default
bindings for the register commands "copy-to-register" (C-x x) and
"insert-register" (C-x g) are probably derived from the TECO "X" and
"G" commands which do essentially the same things.

GNU EMACS has made major advances over TECO and E-Lisp is a much better
programming language for general use than TECO command language, but I
still miss TECO when I want to do a once off complex editing function.
If it is too complicated for a keyboard macro but simple enough for me
to have a fair chance of getting it right first time, I would sooner
write a TECO macro than an E-lisp function definition.
-- 
 Ian Dall           life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts
                              some people more severely than others.
idall@augean.oz