[TUHS] Data structures in Unix editors

[Dave Horsfall]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2021, Tony Finch wrote:

> A curious one is nvi, which uses the Berkeley DB RECNO interface to 
> access a text file as an array of lines (RECNO = record number).

On FreeBSD as least, "nvi" is used instead of "vi" (and is linked).

And oddly enough, BDB is exactly how I would have implemented it...  The 
basic datum is a line after all (I have no idea about EMACS, and don't 
want to know) so it makes sense to use a structure that can rapidly access 
arbitrary line numbers.

-- Dave