Re: "decent" editors (was: line ending summary: the "Breg Hudther ton Proposal")

On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 02:16:36PM -0800, Billy Tanksley wrote:
> From: Greg Stein [mailto:gstein@lyra.org]
>
> >People out there are NOT always going to use a decent editor.
> >We better be
> >able to deal with that. And "deal with" means "not screw them
> >over hard." We really ought to be able to compensate for
> >wackiness from the user.
>
> Not if "compensating for wackiness" means "attempting to act intelligently."
> Which it seems to mean in this case.

It is possible for the computer to know exactly what was meant, and to do so
unambiguously. "intelligence" would seem to imply ambiguity, and in that
case: I would *highly* agree with you. I definitely prefer things that are
deterministic from the users's point of view -- they have to know what is
going to happen, and when.

> And it appears to me that "screw them over hard" means "require a single use
> of a CRLF converter". That doesn't match my definition. To me, "screw them
> over hard" means "default to data-destroying transformations", and that's
> totally out of the question at this point.

I don't know the name of the program on my linux box to do newline
conversions. I don't know how to execute it. Yes, I could dig around
(somebody mentioned "dos2unix", maybe that is a lead). And are there similar
tools available to me on Windows?

What if I'm a relatively computer illiterate?

For a certain class of users and problems, it *is* "hard"

> >[ this reminds me of programs (e.g. parsers) that say "you're missing a
> > semicolon right <there>". well, thanks a lot Mr Program, why
> > didn't you just put it in there for me? you know it should be there ]
>
> Easily answered -- because you might have meant to put in a curly brace
> right over <there> instead. The program knows it ain't smart, so it doesn't
> munge your data.

I was referring to programs that *do* know. No need to try and say my
example is "wrong" -- I get to specify it, not you :-(

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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