Shachar Shemesh
Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:50:42 -0700
Nadav Har'El wrote:
Haven't read any of the presentations yet - all this is from memory and personal experience.Another presentation was given there on a similar topic by Eli Zaretskii who focused, believe it or not, on the MS-DOS EinsteinWriter (yes, this editor was an antique even at that time ;-)), and how well it treated (in his opinion) cursor movement. I'm not sure Eli's opinions were the same as Doug's: http://www.m17n.org/conference/m17n2000_all_but_registration/proceedings/zaretskii/m17n2000.ps.gz
Einstein stored stuff, internally, using a visual memory layout. As a result, all reordering decisions were taken during input (rather than the way more traditional today - input gets stored in the same order it is done, and reordering takes place during output. In fact, input order pretty much defines what "logical order" means). As a result, Einstein had some pretty unsolvable scenarios which it coped with by having a "typewriter mode" - direct visual input of code.
On the major plus side - this mode was clear to everyone. No one had to ask themselves "what should I do in order to get the right result?". On the negative side, the world has gone past the age of fixed width non-editable text input.
Einstein is a fond memory as far as simplicity goes, but there it ends. I do NOT want to go back to that. I worked with it too long ago to remember the details, but I vaguely remember the sigh of relief I had when I moved to logical order editors as far as line splitting and English text in Hebrew paragraphs. If anyone has a copy of Einstein around, I'll be glad to play with it and refresh my memory.
Shachar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]