Thread: Text editor?

Originally Posted by Sly

for me, or for you to explain.

I couldn't tell you much about assembly beyond the fact that you will find learning it more awkward than learning C. I could be wrong.

I also don't know anything about the windows console API (or whatever it's called), but it should not be much more (or less) complicated than curses. Like I said earlier, ncurses() is neat once you learn how to use it, and no doubt so are the other options. Pick which ever one you want. But you won't be finishing that up this evening.

Learning a basic Application Programming Interface is probably a good way to get experience and learn C at the same time. How much you'll have to struggle depends on how much you already know, but I really believe that you should be able to start tackling a console API not long after you get a grasp on datatypes and pointers.

And functions. Functions.

Originally Posted by Sly

No, I know x86 assembly, I am wondering if it would be easier to explain how to edit text with it.

Well if you want to be a real craftsperson.

Originally Posted by Sly

So would you be able to explain how then?

No, I couldn't give you a syntax correct piece of ASM if would win me a trip around the world. But it is unlikely to do that anyway.

Originally Posted by Sly

Come on, it's not that bad.

Writing LARGE portions of assembly code (and in this case, it would be several thousand lines - tamis that I worked on was about 7-8000 lines of 68K or PDP-11 assembler).

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Mats

Originally Posted by Sly

Holy crap!! Still, x86 asm isn't that hard.

No, but considering that both 68K and PDP-11 has generic "memory to memory" moves [and most other operations], and x86 hasn't, that would further extend the number of lines of code by some amount. For example, where in 68K you could do a memcpy() using this:

Code:

// assume A0 and A1 points to the memory to be copied, and D0 is the 
memcpy:
     move.b   (a1)+,  (a0)+
     dbra       d0, memcpy
     ret

Yes, you can do that with rep movs if the registers are in the right place, but it is just ONE possible memory to memory operation - a common one, but there are plenty of places where copying stuff from a data structure to another data structure, for example, would require double the number of x86 instructions compared to the 68K instructions.

So a rough estimate would be that 7000 lines of 68K assembler turns into some 8500 lines of x86 assembler. Not bad, but a good bit of code to write if you are not used to write LARGE programs in assembler.

It is still MUCH easier to write this sort of thing in a language that has ready-made functions to do many string operations, output numbers in almost any format you like, etc, etc.

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Mats