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Re: line-move-visual


From: Mark Crispin
Subject: Re: line-move-visual
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:12:01 -0000
User-agent: Alpine 2.00 (OSX 1167 2008-08-23)

On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, Stefan Monnier posted:
Don't know about mid-70s nor about Emacs-18

emacs 18 and emacs 19 are creations of much later than the mid-1970s.

For mid-1970s emacs, you have to have a CPU (and operating system) capable of running TECO. And not just any old TECO.

Do you have a clue as to what the task entails?
Yup.  I had to create one dummy package that explains to dpkg that some
X11 libs have been renamed.  IIRC that was about it, but yes, it took me
a bit of time to figure it out.

As you noted, even these relatively recent versions require effort. It gets worse the further back you go. The only way to run mid-1970s emacs is via a virtual machine.

The point was that it is ridiculous to tell someone to "install a version of emacs from the mid-1970s" in answer to a complaint about a change that broke behavior dating from the mid-1970s.

Nobody would seriously suggest changing the "/" operator of C to work like APL's reduce operator, on the grounds that division is simply multiplication by the inverse and thus does not need an operator on its own. The semantics of the motion operators in emacs have just as much history.

-- Mark --

http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.


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