where to do line editing?

[Peter da Silva]

In article <12109 at ncoast.UUCP>, allbery at ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
> As quoted from <1220 at ficc.UUCP> by peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva):
> | In article <1495 at mcgp1.UUCP>, fst at mcgp1.UUCP (Skip Tavakkolian) writes:
> | > He asked what would pipes be (take the place of pipes) in the context
> | > of icons.
> | 
> | Pipes should work just fine with icons. Better, even. You should just be
> | able to grab your file, awk, grep, hook them together with rubber band
> | lines, and hit "go". I'm amazed that nobody has implemented this yet.

> I think he means he'd like to see a new socket domain which passes packets
> which would be the equivalent of Macintosh resources (which are what are
> stored in the clipboard and the scrapbook and even on the system heap, as
> well as in the resource forks of files).

OK, what *he's* talking about is interactive cutting and pasting between
windows, which really doesn't have anything to do with icons... after
all, there are window systems with no icons.

What I'm talking about, instead, is what would take the place of pipes
in an icon-based UNIX shell. UNIX is not an interactive environment of
the same sort as the Macintosh, and communication between programs takes
place at a higher level. To put it another way, unlike the Mac, not all
UNIX programs are editors.

Clipboards, in UNIX, can just be files. UNIX file I/O is very fast and
efficient, thanks to some smart buffering. When you clip something, it
can just do a regular save to a file named, oh, ~/clip. Make it an
environment variable ($CLIPBOARD=~/clip). This way you don't have to
duplicate code, and your clipboards are no longer volatile.

What's wrong with his picture?

> The best one can do with pipes
> is implement the equivalent of MacBinary protocol on top of them, which is
> doable but slows things down and makes the code bigger.

Why does it make the code bigger? Your program presumably has save and
restore capability. Just have it save in IFF.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Ferranti International Controls Corporation, sugar!ficc!peter.
"You made a TIME MACHINE out of a VOLKSWAGEN BEETLE?"
"Well, I couldn't afford another deLorean."
"But how do you ever get it up to 88 miles per hour????"