This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Gosling Emacs article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article links to one or more target anchors that no longer exist.
Please help fix the broken anchors. You can remove this template after fixing the problems. |
Reporting errors |
Something should be added to explain what in the world the "skull and crossbones warning" is exactly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.147.234.33 ( talk • contribs) 13:30, 24 May 2007
I'd love to add the actual ASCII art for the skull and crossbones, but neither GNU nor the FSF will cough up source code of an appropriate vintage. Also, with regards to mg's comment to "get back to work", I can't find usenet archives that old. Anyone who can help with either of these two digital archaeology projects is more than welcome to contact me personally. Jfm3 ( talk) 04:28, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
The last piece of Gosmacs code that I replaced was the serial terminal scrolling optimizer, a few pages of Gosling's code which was proceeded by a comment with a skull and crossbones, meaning that it was so hard to understand that it was poison. I had to replace it, but worried that the job would be hard. I found a simpler algorithm and got it to work in a few hours, producing code that was shorter, faster, clearer, and more extensible. Then I made it use the terminal commands to insert or delete multiple lines as a single operation, which made screen updating far more efficient.
I have received a copy of Gosling Emacs from 1999, with RCS version history back to around 1986. It does have the Skull and Crossbone comment in display.c. User:larsbrinkhoff —Preceding undated comment added 19:52, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
A copy of GNU Emacs 13.8 that includes the skull and crossbone comment can found here: https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/emacs-history/blob/sources/decuslib.com/decus/vax85b/gnuemax/emacs/src/display.c. Lars Brinkhoff ( talk) 06:23, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
This article has so much "citation needed" that it makes it unreadable and it discouraged me to improved it! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.37.78.212 ( talk) 12:36, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
I may give some information on the display code...
The display update code in Emacs is very efficient for what iit has been designed for but this was not Emacs!
The display update code was originally designed for an ASCII art editor and Gosling did write an article in CACM (1979 IIRC) and the reason why it is efficient for this ASCII art editor is that there are frequent cases where you need to update more than one place at once in such an editor. For a normal text editor, this display update is an overkill that does not help. A simple update mechanism that is either able to insert or remove chars at a single position is fully sufficient for a text editor. In fact, the display update code in Emacs is worse than the one used in vi.
I know this because around 1985 I wrote a display update code that is much more efficient than the one used in Emacs and in vi. My code is only able to insert or remove chars at a single position and a modify operation is emulated by a delete followed by an insert. As a result of this simple idea, my code needs a lot less CPU time and also does a faster terminal update.
My code is available in the editor ved that is part of the Schily Tools (download a recent schily-*.tar.bz2 archive) and was written without the knowledge on Emacs internals but if you compare the resultant terminal activities for an update, it may appear to be similar to what Emacs does. As I know that Stallman have been told by UNIPRESS to remove the Gosling code (note that Stallman took the UNIPRESS variant of the Emacs source and published it for money under the name GNU emacs), I wrote a mail to Gosling and asked for an explanation of his code to make sure that my code is really different with respect to all aspects of its internals. Gosling then sent me a hint to his CACM article. BTW: if you compare the Gosling Emacs and a recent GNU emacs, the display update is still similar with respect to performance and method. Schily ( talk) 16:13, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Gosling Emacs. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 14:04, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
The first graf references "disputes with UniPress", but it's not clear who had these disputes or what they were about. More info is needed for this sentence to be clear to the uninitiated.
I wonder if anyone has access to the early distribution of emacs referenced here: https://github.com/ildus/bsd_indent/blob/master/README
I'm particularly looking at the version of indent that came with it.
DAWillcox (
talk)
16:16, 3 May 2023 (UTC)