THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXTENSIBLE EDITING ENVIRONMENTS VOL. I: EDITOR ARCHITECTURES
Date
1989-04-01
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Abstract
This document was originally intended to contain more information than it
currently does, but has been reduced to fit within the time constraints of a
one-semester course which involved other term work. As a consequence, both
volumes in this work lack smoothness and completeness; the changes between
topics are often abrupt and there is much left unsaid between the lines.
Nonetheless, the documents will be useful for those wishing to know more about
the internals of extensible editing environments. They explain and compare in
prose many techniques which can only be found and understood through many
hours of figuring out poorly documented source code.
Due to the limited time available for this project, discussions of the
following subject areas have been entirely omitted or severely reduced in
scope:
Virtual terminals and their role in providing machine independent
interfaces to video displays of various kinds and their effects on redisplay
technology.
On-line help systems from the simple Unix man system to the
hierarchical GNU Emacs info system.
Syntax tables and their role in interpreting special classes of
characters (eg. whitespace) for operations such as searching, dispatching,
and balancing.
Searching and replacing from simple linear methods to incremental
and regular expression techniques.
Better explanations of modern conveniences, a more complete discussion
of tag tables, directory editors, programming language editing modes, and
special display modes. These functions are the reason that extensible editors
are so highly valued.
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Computer Science