Re: [StrongED] StrongEd v4.70a11 and Learn/Replay

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In message <6a513555004c42534fd76be962d68e04@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
          Jeremy Nicoll - ml sed <jn.ml.sed45@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 >But, these are not scripted editor functions (so eg nothing like running
> macros inside ispf edit, or VM's xedit - either of which allow program logic to
> issue many editor commands and manipulate files within the editor
> environment); instead all that happens in SE (unless things have changed since the mechanism
> was added to SE?) is that an arbitrary external program/'script' is onvoked and
> told where a copy(? or the original?) file being edited is.

Absolutely right. StrongED's Process function saves out the contents of the window
to a file, 'outfile', runs a command, then either produces a new window or replaces
the contents of the old window with another file, 'infile'. It seems to work OK, but
it always struck me as a bit kludgy. I have fond memories of a text editor on
the BBC B called Wordwise which let you load in various texts and allowed some of
them to be treated as scripts which modified other texts. What I would like to see is
something similar done with Lua. Each text would be a Lua string, and would be
compileable (if syntactically correct) to a function from strings to strings
so that it could be applied to another text. The memory management is already there
in Lua; there would be none of this kludgy saving out to temporary files.
Actually ropes, i.e. strings-with-holes or trees with strings as leaves, would be
a more efficient datatype than strings, but that is another twist.

-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/

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