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> The text of the manual was written using the ed text editor. I guess I should have known, but I had no idea that anyone had written a 50,000-word 300-page ma

> The text of the manual was written using the ed text editor. I guess I should have known, but I had no idea that anyone had written a 50,000-word 300-page manual in ed. It has a bit of a, uh, reputation. https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt

Hextinium 9y ago
I always find all the old programming humor some of the funniest stuff around and people will look at me and ask what are you laughing about but the humor is always lost on them.
marcosdumay 9y ago
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs Yeah, now I want to see he talking about GNU ls and the -h option.
RGS1811 9y ago
The bit about error reporting was the best part. > Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  ?
  - dijit 9y ago
    Ed will error a lot and not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored
    - taejo 9y ago
      > not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored i.e., ?
Koshkin 9y ago
What kind of "reputation"? It is quite usable for typing in text. Hell, even cat > myfile.txt << EOF works fine in many situation. Sure, if one can't think straight, makes a lot of typos and errors that cannot be quickly fixed with a simple backspace, needs a lot (and I mean a lot) of complicated refactoring to be done many times over, then sure - ed is not for them. (Also, do not forget ed's close cousin - sed, a "stream editor" that is widely used even today.)
- nazri1 9y ago
  I'd like to think that programmers back then most likely "graduated" from using punch cards, hence they have a higher mental guard against typos and mistakes when writing their program (or essays), compared to programmers that grow up with unlimited undo/redo. Back then if you had a typo you'd most likely have to wait overnight, or even days to get the notice so you spend a lot of time proofreading your text, and over time it becomes a second nature to write something right (most of the time).
  - lostboys67 9y ago
    Back in the day you wrote your program on paper and sent it to the punch operators
- xelxebar 9y ago
  Just fyi, you don't actually need the heredoc. This works just as well: cat > myfile.txt You can terminate input by sending ascii EOT (Ctrl-D). It makes sense once you realize that heredocs are just a way of explicitly setting the contents of stdin. By not using a heredoc, cat opens stdin and writes it through to 'myfile' or wherever until stdin gets closed, which the terminal driver does for us when we send EOT.
  - groovy2shoes 9y ago
    There is a bit of a difference, though: if your shell has line-editing facilities (readline, libedit, and the like), they're available within the heredoc, but almost certainly not available on cat's stdin. I suppose it's possible to have a version of cat that offers line-editing, but I'm not aware of one (nor do I think it's a particularly good idea to make one, "unix philosophy" and all that). Slap it into an rlwrap, maybe ;)
fasquoika 9y ago
Honestly ed is mostly fine, especially on those old computers. It's basically just the line-based predecessor of vi
- ajross 9y ago
  The line-based predecessor of vi is more properly ex (Bill Joy wrote a VIsual mode of his EXtended editor), which was designed to work in the same regime as ed, but wasn't really compatible. Ex is just vi's command mode. Ed is... different.
alphaalpha101 9y ago
What else would you write it in at the time? When you have a TeleType you can't exactly use a visual text editor, can you?
wrycoder 9y ago
There was a time when a civilized person could sit down and write out a letter (or an essay) longhand, in ink, without making a blot of it. A few overstrike corrections were normal. I've written many Telcomp programs on an ASR33 back in the day using something like ed and thought it was great stuff.
- augustk 9y ago
  "Edsger W. Dijkstra on Dutch TV": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCCigccBzIU&feature=youtu.be&t=4m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCCigccBzIU&feature=youtu.be...
bch 9y ago
"> The text of the manual was written using the ed text editor." From where are you quoting this? I don't see it in TFA.
- lambda 9y ago
  From the rendered manual that is linked from TFA https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf > This manual was set by a Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by the troff formatting program operating under the UNIX system. The text of the manual was prepared using the ed text editor.
  - bch 9y ago
    Thanks. I was looking on the linked site and the README in the repo.
fpoling 9y ago
In 1986 or 1987 as a part of after school lessons I got access to a Soviet clone of IBM 360. Initially the only editor was something very similar to ed. After few hours I felt very comfortable with it. Typing programs in it felt like cool hacking. But then after an upgrade we got a screen editor. It was so much better with moving cursor around and updating/fixing PL1 sources. But the feeling of hacking disappeared.

Hextinium 9y ago

I always find all the old programming humor some of the funniest stuff around and people will look at me and ask what are you laughing about but the humor is always lost on them.

marcosdumay 9y ago

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs Yeah, now I want to see he talking about GNU ls and the -h option.

RGS1811 9y ago

The bit about error reporting was the best part. > Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

xelxebar 9y ago
?
- dijit 9y ago
  Ed will error a lot and not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored
  - taejo 9y ago
    > not give you meaningful reasons as to why it errored i.e., ?

Koshkin 9y ago

What kind of "reputation"? It is quite usable for typing in text. Hell, even cat > myfile.txt << EOF works fine in many situation. Sure, if one can't think straight, makes a lot of typos and errors that cannot be quickly fixed with a simple backspace, needs a lot (and I mean a lot) of complicated refactoring to be done many times over, then sure - ed is not for them. (Also, do not forget ed's close cousin - sed, a "stream editor" that is widely used even today.)

nazri1 9y ago
I'd like to think that programmers back then most likely "graduated" from using punch cards, hence they have a higher mental guard against typos and mistakes when writing their program (or essays), compared to programmers that grow up with unlimited undo/redo. Back then if you had a typo you'd most likely have to wait overnight, or even days to get the notice so you spend a lot of time proofreading your text, and over time it becomes a second nature to write something right (most of the time).
- lostboys67 9y ago
  Back in the day you wrote your program on paper and sent it to the punch operators
xelxebar 9y ago
Just fyi, you don't actually need the heredoc. This works just as well: cat > myfile.txt You can terminate input by sending ascii EOT (Ctrl-D). It makes sense once you realize that heredocs are just a way of explicitly setting the contents of stdin. By not using a heredoc, cat opens stdin and writes it through to 'myfile' or wherever until stdin gets closed, which the terminal driver does for us when we send EOT.
- groovy2shoes 9y ago
  There is a bit of a difference, though: if your shell has line-editing facilities (readline, libedit, and the like), they're available within the heredoc, but almost certainly not available on cat's stdin. I suppose it's possible to have a version of cat that offers line-editing, but I'm not aware of one (nor do I think it's a particularly good idea to make one, "unix philosophy" and all that). Slap it into an rlwrap, maybe ;)

fasquoika 9y ago

Honestly ed is mostly fine, especially on those old computers. It's basically just the line-based predecessor of vi

ajross 9y ago
The line-based predecessor of vi is more properly ex (Bill Joy wrote a VIsual mode of his EXtended editor), which was designed to work in the same regime as ed, but wasn't really compatible. Ex is just vi's command mode. Ed is... different.

alphaalpha101 9y ago

What else would you write it in at the time? When you have a TeleType you can't exactly use a visual text editor, can you?

wrycoder 9y ago

There was a time when a civilized person could sit down and write out a letter (or an essay) longhand, in ink, without making a blot of it. A few overstrike corrections were normal. I've written many Telcomp programs on an ASR33 back in the day using something like ed and thought it was great stuff.

augustk 9y ago
"Edsger W. Dijkstra on Dutch TV": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCCigccBzIU&feature=youtu.be&t=4m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCCigccBzIU&feature=youtu.be...

bch 9y ago

"> The text of the manual was written using the ed text editor." From where are you quoting this? I don't see it in TFA.

lambda 9y ago
From the rendered manual that is linked from TFA https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf > This manual was set by a Graphic Systems phototypesetter driven by the troff formatting program operating under the UNIX system. The text of the manual was prepared using the ed text editor.
- bch 9y ago
  Thanks. I was looking on the linked site and the README in the repo.

fpoling 9y ago

In 1986 or 1987 as a part of after school lessons I got access to a Soviet clone of IBM 360. Initially the only editor was something very similar to ed. After few hours I felt very comfortable with it. Typing programs in it felt like cool hacking. But then after an upgrade we got a screen editor. It was so much better with moving cursor around and updating/fixing PL1 sources. But the feeling of hacking disappeared.