Post #1444947

2026-03-07 19:02 UTC

@wrog > I'm also guessing TECO wouldn't have existed without there being people who managed to wrap their brains around it and found it to be expressive and concise. I myself never got there (also never really tried TBH), I'm one of those people, BTW. My proof is that I wrote a closed-loop stick figure ASCII animation juggling three balls. As with any complex TECO thing, the resulting code was write-only -- and that was always the problem with even mildly powerful TECO macros. Perl at its worst can be described as write-only line noise, yes, but in my experience is *STILL* better than TECO! I am indeed fortunate to be able to stick with Emacs and Vi. @kentpitman @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot

Replies (1)

@kentpitman@climatejustice.social 2026-03-07 19:08

@dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot TECO was a necessary innovation under word-addressed memory. With 36 bits per word, you couldn't afford that much space for an instruction. 5 7-bit bytes (with a bit left over) 8n one word was a lot more compact than an assembly instruction. With only 256 KW (kilowords) total addressable in 18 bits, you had to get all the power packed in you could. And we didn't have WYSIWYG yet, and most computer people couldn't type. So it would make a lot more sense to you if you were doing hunt and peck with almost no visibility into what you're changing. Typing -3cifoo$$ to mean go back three characters and insert foo and show me what the few characters around my cursor look like was extremely natural in context. That it became a programming language was a natural extension of that so that you didn't have to keep typing the same things over and over again.

Open ##1444948