Thread: Text editor?

Originally Posted by matsp

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.

Really. Wouldn't this be easy in BASIC?

Originally Posted by Sly

So what if you mix C and assembly so you could do it in the least possible time?

If you feel that your assembler knowledge is BETTER than your C knowledge, then you probably should practice the C knowledge, as it is much more commercially valuable than assembler knowledge (not that assembler is not valuable, but more companies write in C than in x86-assembler).

And no, I doubt you will get it done faster by writing ANY of it in assembler.

The reason TAMIS was written in Assembler was to make it small and a RTS (RunTime Support) module. Pascal and C which were the languages available at the time needed their own RTS, so that could not be used for an RTS. Since the PDP-11 machine we shared at school had about 70 terminals, connected to ONE machine, sharing all the users for TAMIS into one 16KB region of memory would help the machine not swap the processes out so much - as the machine had 2MB of RAM. The previous editor was written in Pascal, and used up a total of about 150KB (using overlays, since the memory available to one process was 64KB). When 15-20 people are all using the "big" editor, the machine would run at crawling speed - even for it's days.

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Mats