Re: Possible activity heading towards XyWrite replacement

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Good discussion. Without wanting to sound contentious, I'd like to respond
to some of your statements (noting that you do make some good points):
>     replacement string for portions match by "wildcards". For
>     example, if X denotes some kind of "wildcard" expression,
>     and a search argument like "abXcdXef" finds matchs of
>     abJOEcdFREDef and abMARYcdJANEef, then the change command
>     can be made to replace
>
>      abJOEcdFREDef with abMIKEcdJOHNef, and
>      abMARYcdJANEef with abSUEcdMISTYef,
>
>     by appropriate specification of from and to arguments.
I don't think I understand your example. Does one command produce both
changes on one pass? That seems unlikely. How would it know when to put in
MIKE for the first wildcard and when to put in SUE? What is the content of
the search-and-replace command?
 XyWrite IV does introduce wildcard search-and-replace, which is an
incredibly helpful feature. Just today I had occasion to use wildcard CI
(in XPL code) to solve a problem of changing a file that has dates followed
by text. I needed to insert a comma between the end of the date and the
text (which could have been jammed against the end or separated by a space
or virtually anything). E.g., here are three samples lines of a file
without 2,000 or so such lines:

8-22-08, Doug Arends, 145, prev: 2008-8 new: 2009-8pp
8-22-08, Gus Van Horn, 145, prev: 2007-12 new: 2009-8pp
8-22-08, Vikram Bajaj, 145, prev: 2008-7 new: 2009-7 as promised 8-8-08pp
How do you put the comma in, after the dates following "new: ", in one
(well, two) fell swoops without wildcards? You can't in III+, but in Xy IV
I just did the following (where "N" means the wildcard for any number, and
using the "not-the-following-character" wildcard)

ci /new: NNNN-NN/new: NNNN-NN,/  <--- for two-digit months
ci /new: NNNN-N[not]N/new: NNNN-N,[not]N/  <--- for one-digit months

Voila!
>    f. Coloring. Each character in a "buffer" for a file being
>     edited has a settable *and queryable* "color" attribute,
>     which controls the background and foregroud colors used
>     in displaying that character. This facility is used for
>     the "code coloring" that epsilon does.
You can do that in TAMEdos Xy. Maybe not exactly what you mean, but any
MoDe can be given any Windows color (of the millions of colors Windows has
available).
>     All of the user commands are written in EEL, and all EEL
>     source code is provided. This is not like XPL code --
>     it's semi-compiled a thousand times faster. So it's
>     really a different ballgame than XyWrite.
A thousand times faster than already virtually instantaneous? I have some
*very* long XPL programs that do heavy processing, and the longest one
takes about four seconds to run. User commands in XPL have no noticeable delay.
>     How many time
>     have we just wished that XyWrite source code was
>     available, so that this or that glitch/shortcoming could
>     be fixed right?
I can't recall any, but there must have been no more than two or three in
all these years.
> The above is just a list of some major things that come to mind,
> and is by no means all-inclusive.

And, again, the one's I *didn't* comment on are real advantages.
The disadvantages you list are deal-breakers for me . . . unless you
develop a more Xy-like front-end.

Thanks.

Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx