Talk:Se (text editor)

Role of Jack Waugh

Sometime I may want to touch the article, but for now will just note here.

http://hpux.ewi.tudelft.nl/hppd/hpux/Editors/se-1.3/man.html (retrieved 2008-02-12) says:

     On the
     Pr1me computers at the School of Information and Computer Science at
     Georgia Tech, Dan Forsyth, Perry Flinn, and Alan Akin added all the
     enhancements suggested in the exercises in the book, and some more of
     their own. Jack Waugh made extensive modifications to turn the line
     editor into a screen editor; further work was done by Dan Forsyth.
     All of this was in an improved Georgia Tech version of Ratfor.

(The "book" this excerpt refers to is _Software Tools_ by Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger).

As the reference says, I, Jack Waugh, modified the version of "ed" that was coded in Ratfor into the screen version "se". I may want to credit myself for that in the article; I guess I can cite the above as my authority for claiming this credit.

To add anything of my own knowledge would be "original research", so I can't properly add to the main article, but will add here, that I originated the name "se". In the final version from my hands, the left margin that the editor would show looked much as in the illustration that the main article points to. The capital letters and the arrow were present. The user could type one of the capital letters as a line address.

My version did not use curses (which I'm not sure existed at the time). I wrote a routine I called "loadstr" (for load string) that would place a string at given coordinates on the screen; this took care of portability to different kinds of terminals the way curses eventually would. loadstr would compare the given string to a memory of what was already on the screen and would optimize output accordingly, not bothering to repaint the same characters that were already there (except in cases where that was the most efficient way to move the cursor to the next place it needed to be).

The reference above misspells the name of T. Allen Akin as "Alan" Akin. Also, it suggests there was more than one Prime at Georgia Tech; I only saw one.

Before I wrote "se", I had seen one screen editor, the Rand editor, which ran on Unix. It would crash a lot, but kept a log from which it could recover.

A trivium:

Immediately after I graduated from Georgia Tech, I went to work at RLG Associates. I modified the Unix "ed" to recreate "se" for my use there. The only terminal in the office that had lowercase was the one the secretary used. The programmers used uppercase-only terminals. Case is significant in C code and of course the braces {} occur. So I made that version of "se" use two rows on the terminal when necessary to indicate case; the letters were on the upper row and the lower row would have equal signs to effectively double-underline the letters that were in upper case. So, for example, the text "#define FOO 3" would come out as

. -> |#DEFINE FOO 3
     |        ===

I think I represented the braces as parentheses underlined.

Jack Waugh (talk) 15:09, 12 February 2008 (UTC)