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Path: utzoo!lsuc!dave
From: dave@lsuc.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: What became of QED
Message-ID: <1987Dec3.003330.15464@lsuc.uucp>
Date: Thu, 3-Dec-87 00:33:28 EST
Article-I.D.: lsuc.1987Dec3.003330.15464
Posted: Thu Dec  3 00:33:28 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Dec-87 17:46:59 EST
References: <10512@brl-adm.ARPA>
Reply-To: dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman)
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 42
Summary: the ed-derived qed is still going strong

jones%cs.uiowa.edu@RELAY.CS.NET (Douglas Jones) writes:
>By way of history, QED was originally written by Deutsch and Lampson back
>on the Berkeley Timesharing System (they published a CACM paper on it in
>Dec. 1967).  Ken Thompson did a version of QED on MULTICS, (the tech report
>came out before the Deutsch and Lampson's paper), and Ritchie and Thompson
>did a version on the Murray Hill GCOS Timesharing System in 1970.  ED on UNIX
>is a scaled back version of the GCOS QED editor...
>
>Does anyone know why Ritchie and Thompson dropped the features they did when
>they made QED into ED on UNIX?  If the reason was memory capacity, now that
>most UNIX systems have capacity, why hasn't anyone put these features back
>into text processing tools such as SED?

It's been said that ed retained 90% of the power of the original
qed while requiring only 10% of the complexity.  I think
that answers your question: it's consistent with the origins of UNIX.

A number of people, including me, use a qed derived from ed, however.
It's essentially a superset of ed, with a lot of *extremely* useful
features, the most notable of which is multiple buffers. (When
working with a large package, I "qed *.c" and buzz around between
the buffers making changes.)

This qed was extended from the U of Toronto v6 ed, originally by
Tom Duff, and then further reworked and extended by Rob Pike when
at Caltech and then Bell Labs.  (I now use a further enhanced
version by David Tilbrook, which includes in-line editing and
other neat features.)  Of course, editor preferences are
always religious matters, but I've always found qed to be
faster and more flexible than anything else around.  Its
string registers and other tools allow it to be used as a
(very cryptic) programming language, as well.

The Pike qed may be distributed to anyone with a UNIX source
license (required because it's still v6 ed down deep).
Quite a number of people with a Toronto connection use it.

David Sherman
The Law Society of Upper Canada
-- 
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Pronounce it ell-ess-you-see, please...