[COFF] TECO variants (was Re: Perl (was Re: forth on early unix))

[Lars Brinkhoff via COFF]

Joseph Holsten wrote:
> Did you get use TECO much? I’ve wondered how unusual extensions like
> Control-R were on other systems. Were different implementations as
> different as some authors make it sound? Or were they roughly as
> similar as the QED implementations?

PDP-6 TECO (running standalone) and ITS TECO is readily available if you
want to try them yourself.  Basic text editing and navigation is easy
enough.  You have to enter the mindset that you edit one page at a time
and then move on to the next.

Other TECO variants also got real-time display, but I don't know if
they used Control-R to enter that mode, or something else.

> Also, do you buy the modern argument that TECO vs emacs proved the
> command language and the extension language should be entirely
> different?

Yes, I think so.  Lisp is better extension language than TECO.  The
semantics of the ITS TECO programming language are actually fine, but
the terse syntax is difficult.