Allen wrote:
PDP machines are actually quite useful as someone brought them up on here not long ago. they have to be big from the looks of them.
for editing, I use Vi and Emacs. Vi is way older than DOS ;)
Real programmers use ed. :-) Vi is for sissies. Vi is just a front end for screen display, but under the hood ed is still very much alive and kicking. With ed you can turn a MB text file (about a 1000 page book) into garbage at the drop of a hat. Ed has only one error message: ? (pronounce: Huh?) So you'd type in 1,$s/\([0-9]*\)\([a-zA-Z. ]*\)$/\2 \1/ to (yes!) interchange all student numbers and student names in a document and ed would come back with Huh?, because you forgot the couple of spaces between number and name. But after a day of trial and error it was very rewarding to have those two columns, in fact, interchanged. :-) OTOH you might have turned the whole file into garbage. So ed taught you to back up or else... Regards, -- Jos van Kan registered Linux user #152704