[squeak-dev] support of various line ends in trunk

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Tue Nov 17 14:30:53 UTC 2009


2009/11/17 Juan Vuletich <juan at jvuletich.org>:
> Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> That's where we could choose one or another line endings etc.. but not
>> in text editor, which is a nonsense because it deals with live
>> objects.
>>
>
> The editors in Squeak (in browsers, for example) deal with live objects:
> instances of class String. They might include any sequence of characters.
> Including those you don't like.
>

Squeak's Text editor operating with instances of Text, to be more
precise. And Text instance is already far more than a String, but i
think you know it yourself , so i wonder why you persist pointing me
to Strings.
The issue we're arguing is about String <-> Text conversion, and
internal representation of text in editor.
I stating, that we could completely get rid of any notion of controls
characters in Text , as well as in text editors,
and make implementation cleaner & leaner and free of any bizarre &
cryptic character mangling.
And then we could have only few places, where we should care about
control chars: String <=> Text conversion and/or
Stream <=> Text conversion.

>>> In Squeak, the editor is the way a developer has to interact (i.e. edit)
>>> String objects. It is not an end-user editor adapted to whatever end-user
>>> needs you have in mind.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Hmm.. i was always thinking that text editor is for editing the text,
>> not Strings. :)
>>
>
> Then may be you're wrong.
>
>> Look, we write tools for users, but not for machine.
>> Same as we should invent languages to serve for developers, not for
>> compilers.
>>
>
> Dev tools are for developers. That's what the base system is about. Not
> about the machine, not about end-users. Just developers.
>

And who are the developers from text-editor point of view? Aren't they
just users who need to edit a text?
I barely see, where i could make use of editor which allows me to edit
control chars.
During my lifetime experience as developer, i never had a need to deal
with control characters in editor.
I'd rather prefer to convert it before/after editing than inside an
editor, or use binary editor, where i can see & change every byte.

I didn't said that we won't need to deal with line endings, but please
tell me, why it should be a text editor?
I know, that TextEditor in Squeak tries to do everything at once.. but
don't you think that maybe it is time to repurpose it for only text
editing, while leave rest to other tools?
Lets create & use a separate tools for that. Text editor - for editing
a text. String/text converter - for conversion & dealing with line
endings and other idiosyncrazy.

And then both, developers and users will be pretty happy.

> Cheers,
> Juan Vuletich
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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