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Re: Several beginner-questions


From: Pascal J. Bourguignon
Subject: Re: Several beginner-questions
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:20:08 -0000
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.3 (gnu/linux)

Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@gmail.com> writes:

> On Wednesday 27 July 2011 06:40:30 Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> > From: Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko@gmail.com>
>> > Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:57:05 +0100
>> > 
>> > I guess I wasn't clear enough. I have never used Emacs under DOS, and I
>> > am not saying that there is any existing code to be backported. But I
>> > did use other text editors under DOS (the rudimentary "Edit" editor
>> > comes to mind), and most of them had the pull-down menus drawn in
>> > ascii-art using various "graphics" characters (greater-than-128 codes of
>> > ascii of the bios-provided font).
>> 
>> Emacs does as well, but only in its DOS build.  I was saying that
>> someone should take that code and implement it for the Unix TTY.
>
> Aha, ok. So I guess I was right to assume that this already exists, I just 
> missed that it exists only for the DOS build. Understood. :-)
>
> Unfortunately, as much as I would like to see those menus in Unix TTY, I 
> don't 
> think that I have enough knowledge to actually port the code. :-( Maybe one 
> day...

It's by doing it that you will acquire the knowledge of how to do it.
If you wait, you'll never know how to do it.
Just do it!



>> Most of the software you see today copycats Microsoft Windows GUI
>> style, so it's no surprise they all look similar and different from
>> Emacs.  

Which copycats Apple MacOS GUI style, which copycats Xerox Smalltalk GUI
style.

>> Emacs predates all of them.  

(Not GNU emacs, but emacs existed before GNU emacs, and indeed, predates
even Smalltalk).


>> So if you want to talk about
>> weird defaults, it's those other programs that are "weird" ;-)

Absolutely.


> Oh, but I didn't use "weird" in the "different from MS editors" sense, but in 
> the "why would anyone want to count columns from zero?" sense. The fact that 
> Emacs was designed before most other editors is something I appreciate, but 
> it 
> has nothing to do with the default being "weird" (tradition notwithstanding).

It is because one counts from zero.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html

What's weird is to count from one.  Only uncultured savages could ignore
zero and start counting from one.


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.


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