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The editor in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlisp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlisp did work directly on list structure instead of on top of a character
by abecedarius 12y ago
The editor in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlisp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlisp did work directly on list structure instead of on top of a character-string editor. (I never studied it carefully since at least at first it worked through a tty interface and that's pretty inherently a pain, like Unix ed.) I think I read somewhere that Deutsch's PDP-1 Lisp pioneered that editing model, though I may be completely misremembering.
- agumonkey 12y agoWhen looking at pictures of PDP-1 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1, one may have a hard time believing someone thought of structure based editing at all. ps: I rarely hear about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Peter_Deutsch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Peter_Deutsch but his work is impressive.
- abecedarius 12y agoIt seems to make sense: the interpreter already stores list structure to interpret, there's no space in RAM for a redundant second representation, and going to external storage for the text would practically force batch mode when the store is paper tape or punch cards. That's similar to 70s/80s home computers keeping BASIC code in RAM in tokenized form, except there you had to type a line over again to edit it. (But on larger machines in the 70s I get the impression Interlisp stayed with structure-editing for its advantages, not just inertia. It was killed off by Common Lisp which owed more to the east-coast Lispers who gave us Emacs.)
- agumonkey 12y agoGood point. Nowadays the constraint of communicating between processes makes text serializing valuable, when back in the days direct manipulation (I believe there was no processes and no isolation) was the norm ? I thought emacs text buffer genes came from being implemented on and for *nix ..