Broff and a proposed net project

[Zigurd R. Mednieks]

It's quite true that most business word processing consists of letter
writing, where what-you-see-is-what-you-get is exactly the right thing.
Since only one or two pages are being dealt with, you don't run into
re-pagination lossage. Also, the way a business letter looks is
important, and if the letter's content is, say, just a "thank-you", the
appearance might be more important than the content.

Wang has, therefore, done well with an editor that shows you pretty much
what you would see on paper. But you pay a price: The text files contain
formatting information, so they can't be easily viewed without the text
processor; On most Unix systems, mimicing the Wang display style would
mean transmitting a dozen or more characters for each character typed!
Yow, Vaxen eaten alive by ravenous DZs! Of course this matters less, if
at all, on personal workstation machines.

But, if you strip off some of the features, you can build a good
mixed-mode text processing system that does most things as you type, and
time consuming things later. A recent Seybold Report had good things to
say about one Wangish text processor by NBI, but it requires hardware
support (for the IBM PC), and one mixed-mode system, by Mark of the
Unicorn. (And if you think that's an odd name, NBI stands for Nothing
But Initials.) And Wang has their own re-implementation of their text
processor running on their PC.

If you say emacs is expensive, you better say which one. MINCE (stands
fo MINCE Is Not Complete Emacs) is probabaly the fastest visual editor
available for Unix. (Venturcom sells it.) The author did not call it
emacs because emacs ("emacs" comes from Editor MACroS) means extensible,
and while you can compile new functions into MINCE quite cleanly, you
don't have an implementation language like Mock-Lisp or TECO(!!!) that
lets you add things on the fly. This means that a "real" emacs has to
carry around the overhead of any interpretive system.

Parenthetically, here is an incomplete list of emacses and near-emacses:
The original emacs, written in TECO by Richard Stallman at MIT is
available free (if you've got a PDP10 to run it). Multics Emacs, written
in Multics MacLisp, by Bernie Greenberg, is available from Honeywell.
Gosling's Emacs, written by James Gosling at CMU, runs on Unixes,
available from Unipress. MINCE, written by Craig Finseth, in C, running
on everthing from CP/M systems on up, available for Unix through
Venturcom, and for all else through Mark of the Unicorn. Perfect Writer
is an early version of MINCE, available through Perfect Software.
Another emacs has just recently been written in Scheme for the HP200 at
MIT by persons unknown to me. NILE (NILE Is Like Emacs) comes with the
NIL language for VMS, written by Richard Soley and others. TV is an
emacs for the Perkin-Elmer 32-bit machines running under a Multics-like
operating system, written by Ted Anderson. Lastly, and mostly, is
ZEMACS, written is Zetalisp and running on the Lisp Machine, available
from Symbolics and Lisp Machine Inc, and including more features than I
have ever seen in any five systems of any sort, but NO WHAT-YOU-SEE... 
Whew! But I'm sure there are more. 

Now which emacs do you mean?

But back to "Unix meets Wangwriter." Another reason Wang-like text
processing does not fit in well with Unix is that almost every file that
contains data on Unix is human readable. So unless you opt for complete
integratation -- like in the Lisa or Star -- awk , sed, diction, spell
and etc. are going to have as hard a time dealing with your bussiness
letters as you would without the editor.

What to do? One possiblilty would be to keep formatting information in a
separate companion file. If the free text gets bashed, then the editor
tries its best to figure out how it was bashed (the companion file could
be a superset of the free text, including its contents plus formatting
info) and rebuilds the companion file. But one could speculate forever.
I, for one, have so far resisted the urge to write The Great American
Text Editor.

Cheers,
Zig