31 Jan
2021
31 Jan
'21
9:26 p.m.
I used Ken's qed in pre-Unix days. I understand its big departure from the
original was regular expressions. Unix ed was the same, with
multi-file capability dropped. Evidently the lost function was not much
missed, for it it didn't come back when machines got bigger. I remember
that fairly early in PDP-11 development ed gained three features: & in the
rhs of substitutions plus k and t commands. (I'm not sure about &--that was
50 years ago.).
With hindsight it's surprising that a "minimalist" design had m but not
t,
for m can be built from t but not vice versa. A cheat sheet for multics qed
is at h
<http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-guide.pdf>
ttp://
www.bitsavers.org/pdf//honeywell/multics/swenson/6906.multics-condensed-gui….
It had two commands I don't remember: sort(!) and transform, which I assume
is like y in sed.
Doug