Re: [StrongED] StrongED search and replace

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In message <47f5125b75f4db9ff3acdb8379b917b9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
          Jeremy Nicoll - ml sed <jn.ml.sed45@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 2017-12-29 17:44, Gavin Wraith wrote:
>
>> Because the use of scripting with StrongED is so powerful,
>> quite a large chunk of what is already built into StrongED
>> becomes superfluous.
>
> The thing is, although I agree that the scripting facility is
> better than no scripting facility, in essence all you're doing
> is using an external program to manipulate the file's contents.
> You didn't need StrongED at all, to do that.

This is true. Looking through the other end of the telescope, one
can say that StrongED provides a useful environment for developing
and testing programs written for certain languages.

> The bad thing is that for a file that's already loaded into
> RAM, the scripting framework has to write a copy of that out
> to disk, process it & read it back in.  It's a long way from
> being efficient.   Probably that doesn't matter for 'small'
> files on modern hardware though.
>
> It's nothing like as elegant or efficient as scripts that run
> inside an editor, acting on the file that's in RAM at the time
> & issuing editor commands to query & change the data.  Editors
> that support that sort of thing enable users to capitalise on
> their existing knowledge of editor concepts & commands, though
> of course the users do have to learn the scripting language
> that the editor's programmer(s)' chose to implement.

I have fond memories of FirstWordPlus (?) which allowed you to load
multiple texts into separate buffers and you could have one text
process another.

I agree, the mechanism for scripting in StrongED is not efficient.
The 'Process' command, upon which it depends, was very much an
afterthought of Guttorm Vik. I do not think he had foreseen how
it would be used. I would certainly like to see an editor
incorporating a Lua interpreter (only 50K! not so difficult
if the editor is written in C and uses Lua to allocate
its buffers) that allowed the contents of one buffer to read,
process and write to another.
-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/

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