Re: TAME Pre6

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from Harry Binswanger  Sat, 29 Jul
2006 15:55:40 -0400

> Since David Thomas uses "mark" for what we call "DeFining a
> block" I think he means that you can speed things up by
> assigning, to the delete key: DF,CR,DF,RD. I just tried that,
> and it is indeed just as speedy as RC. Perhaps RC, at machine
> code level, reduces to something equivalent to DF,CR,DF,RD.

I'm coming in from left field here, but... that sounds highly
unlikely to me. RC, like any function, is an atomic operation --
absolutely minimalist. DF,CR,DF,RD, by comparison, is a hulking big
molecule that adds a ton of overhead to a simple instruction. 
Indeed, in my tests, DF,CR,DF,RD is slower than RC by a factor of 3!
What's more, it fails miserably -- deletes the wrong text! -- if a
block is already defined; you need to preface all of that with a
func YD, which releases the existing DeFine (and it's crazy to undo
an existing block simply to delete a single char -- yet another
reason to steer clear of this). I doubt very much that Thomas is
suggesting such a nonsensical operation; if he is, he's dead wrong.

Thomas's remark isn't crystal clear, but I think he's saying
something else entirely. He seems to be saying he didn't think the
Delete key was one "where fast repeat is needed", because instead of
hitting Del *repeatedly* to erase a *sequence of characters*, you
can always do a block delete instead -- in other words, use the
cursor keys to do the "repeating" when you DeFine (mark) the block
to delete. I don't think he's talking at all about changing the
Delete key assignment in the keyboard file. On the contrary, he
seems to be counseling against that, because he also says that if
you use fast repeat with non-standard key assignments, "the wrong
thing happens".

That said, the safest thing would be to ask him what he means.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx