Aucbvax.4732
fa.editor-p
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people
Tue Oct 27 20:48:11 1981
small machines
1) Secondary storage for the temp file is NOT a severe problem.
   If the editors he's seen are slow, it is because they are poorly
   implemented.  Rare indeed is the program which is truly I/O bound,
   and the general programming quality in text editors I have seen
   has not always been good. A carefully designed I/O implementation
   can leave the bottlenecks in the algorithms instead of the disk.
   For example, Unix ed's I/O provides nearly instantaneous response
   to most commmands.  (Its not being a state of the art editor
   by his criterion is irrelevant to issues of buffer management.)
2) Micros are NOT hard to program.  Some machines have comfortable
   environments, and those that don't offer nothing that I would want
   to edit anyway.

----- Mail saved at Mon Oct 26 21:22:49 1981
Subject: small machines
dlw@MIT-AI is wrong on both counts:
1) Secondary storage for the temp file is NOT a severe problem.
   If the editors he's seen are slow, it is because they are poorly
   implemented.  Rare indeed is the program which is truly I/O bound,
   and the general programming quality in text editors I have seen
   has not always been good. A carefully designed I/O implementation
   can leave the bottlenecks in the algorithms instead of the disk.
   For example, Unix ed's I/O provides nearly instantaneous response
   to most commmands.  (Its not being a state of the art editor
   by his criterion is irrelevant to issues of buffer management.)
2) Micros are NOT hard to program.  Some machines have comfortable
   environments, and those that don't offer nothing that I would want
   to edit anyway.

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