THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXTENSIBLE EDITING ENVIRONMENTS VOL. I: EDITOR ARCHITECTURES

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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
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