Re: Looking for XyWrite

[leslie bialler lb136@xxxxxxxx]

Russell Lewis wrote:
>
>
> Rene von Rentzell, Tokyo  writes:
>
> >Leslie:
> >>Ah yes, many hereabouts are inordinately fond of that version,
> >>considered by more than one of us to the the word processing equivalent
> >>of a '57 Chevy.
> >
> >Umm... what is a 57 Chevy? I tend to think of XY3 in word processing
> >as the equivalent of "the wheel", or "fire".
>
> I, too, would quibble with the word "inordinately."

You, _too_? I do no consider Rene's quip a quibble. Indeed, he seems to
be using it as a metaphor for the basic equipment around which
improvements are made. You cannot have failed to observe that this
thread was begun by someone wondering how to perform certain functions
in Xy3 that he had discovered in Xy4. I, and several others, have
explained that these features did not exist in Xy3. Similarly, while the
57 Chevy was the state of the art at the time, I wouldn't get into one
today: it had an unpadded dashboard, no seatbelts or airbags, had a v8
engine that probably got eight mpg, etc. etc.

> There is a certain
> beauty in the simplicity of the earlier versions of many of today's
> software products. Edsger W. Dijkstra, in his book _A Discipline of
> Programming_, speaks to this problem regarding the increasing complexity
> in programming languages:
>
>   When they fell cheated because I just ignore all the bells and
>   whistles, I can only answer: "Are you quite sure that all those
>   bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so-called
>   'powerful' programming languages, belong to the solution set rather
>   than to the problem set?"
>

Yeah, whatever.


--

Leslie Bialler
Columbia University Press
lb136@xxxxxxxx