Input Line Editing

[Barry Shein]

One thing about fancy input line editing: it should probably be either
everywhere or nowhere (I distinguish "fancy" only because Unix,
particularly BSD, already has some line editing, such as erase-word.)

What I don't like about just putting it into a shell is that it then
conflicts with habits when using a simple program which just does
reads, a human interface issue. I also like the idea that any
programmer's program (even a neophyte's own) tends to work more or
less as well as the shell on really visible things like input editing.

If there's one criticism I have of TOPS-20's fancy input editing it's
that it was incredibly baroque for the programmer, and rarely
available to the higher level language programmer in any reasonable
way (eg. thru the languages' std input methods, like scanf().) It may
have been the cat's meow in some's eyes in effects, but it sure wasn't
very well thought out in terms of letting (mortal) applications
programmers near it, so vanilla applications tended to look kind of
klunky and brain-damaged (and that OS had no particular interest in
device independance tho one could code anything if they had the
patience to run thru enough JSYS's to get the effect they wanted.)

I haven't looked at the Unix COMND routines from, I believe, Columbia,
perhaps I (we) should.

The other question is, if it's done as an intermediate process how
does the process know when to step out of the way because a newly
started job is doing its own style of input editing? (yes, I'm bracing
myself for the answer...)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University