I hate C++

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by Farren

True. And you can write a novel in Vi. Its just a LOT easier to write large, elegantly structured and readable programs using an object oriented language.

And I maintain that it is practical do to so in C. Many object-oriented constructs and libraries have been created and used in C, including the linux kernel, X, openssl, Gnome, SDL, and gcc. I do not consider them any less usable or comprehensible for being written in C, but they are much more sturdy and portable for having been written in C. Even when I write libraries in C++, I am very careful to ensure they export to the C namespace so both languages can use it.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by JoeP

But why in separate files? 'interface' and 'implementation' serve exactly this purpose in delphi/pascal and enable fast compilation.

What makes you think there's a single file to implement a header?

Consider something like <stdio.h>, which has a number of files some of which are public and some private, but all of which are related.

Anyway, it's nice to be able to give out the interface without exposing code. If you use <stdio.h>, you don't even have a COPY of the real code, you're just using the defined interface - and it is, indeed, faster to parse that interface than to parse the whole file.

And it seems to me the need for different member notations is solved by strong typing. object.member works in delphi because the compiler knows object is a pointer and automatically dereferences it. Likewise :: - class functions are class funtions and declared as such. You don't need a different notation to access them.

C is strongly typed enough that you could do this; the notation is probably partially historical from BCPL-era programming, where an object was an object and you could use it either way.

I actually like having the different notation, because it makes it easier to see what the object is that I'm using, and catches the possible errors where I mistakenly think I have one thing rather than another.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Farren

True. And you can write a novel in Vi. Its just a LOT easier to write large, elegantly structured and readable programs using an object oriented language.

Er.

What should I be using instead of vi?

I ask sincerely. I am a full-time writer, and I have written a book, not to mention hundreds of thousands of words of non-book stuff.

I wrote the book in vi. It was dramatically faster than any of the alternatives I've seen.

[Farren]

Holy shit seebs! You wrote a book in vi? vi is an abomination, a horror, a counter productivity tool!

Seriously though, back in the day when I was a journalist for a while (DOS era) Caxton press used a word processing program called xywrite which like vi had lots of fiddly command line stuff. It took me about a week to memorise everything, like the codes for multiple columns, justification and so on and then it was plain sailing.

I was chatting to a friend of mine the other day and speculating how, were I to encounter xywrite again, it would probably take forever to learn because of an in-built resistance to the format (like the zen story with the full cup).

I know quite a few guys who are 100% happy with vi, but what I absolutely refuse to believe is that you can do everything you can do in a modern word processor like Word or OpenOffice in vi - at the same speed.

Come on! Inserting pictures, setting the text wrapping to be asthetically pleasing, floating frames, columns, bullet text, numbered bullet text, legal numbered bullet text, editing comments, line spacing, styles, style sheets, automatic insertion of contents, index and footnotes, page headers and footers showing last save file name automatically, automatically updating page number of total page numbers? You gotta be kidding me.

Its bizarre, as some of my friends do, to claim that you can do everything in vi as easily and quickly as it can be done with a visual word processor. I've no doubt for simple scripts and layout an experienced vi user can work at a fair clip, but there are a whole ton of tasks (like working with captioned images) that are just way, way better suited to the WYSIWYG environment.

Hell I haven't written a book ... yet ... but I've written about 110 chapters of various books that never got finished, lots of articles (post xywrite) for various publications and tons of huge needs analysis and specification documents. I wish I could could come over there and take the word processor challenge against you, word for word, and see who gets the same document out in the fastest time using their tool of choice.

On the other hand, we could just compare penis sizes

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Farren

I know quite a few guys who are 100% happy with vi, but what I absolutely refuse to believe is that you can do everything you can do in a modern word processor like Word or OpenOffice in vi - at the same speed.

Ahh, but ninety percent of what you do in a "modern word processor" is not writing, it's formatting. Or, in my experience, fighting with the formatting. Word's attempts to "help" me consumed about 20% of my time when I was using it.

Come on! Inserting pictures, setting the text wrapping to be asthetically pleasing, floating frames, columns, bullet text, numbered bullet text, legal numbered bullet text, editing comments, line spacing, styles, style sheets, automatic insertion of contents, index and footnotes, page headers and footers showing last save file name automatically, automatically updating page number of total page numbers? You gotta be kidding me.

But most of those aren't part of writing a book. I wrote my book in DocBook. Text wrapping? Done automatically. Columns? Don't need 'em. Floating frames? I think I may have used sidebars. Bullet text? Specified as lists, and without the problem that deleting a character somewhere in a line might cause it to become part of a separate list, or having other paragraphs added to the list unpredictably. Line spacing, style sheets? Handled by the formatter. Page headers and footers showing file name? Don't want 'em. Contents, index, and footnotes? Done automatically. Page numbers, done automatically.

But that's rendering.

And not having to wait for the computer to do it, or fuss with it, is a big plus.

So... Here's the thing. All that mousing around is cognitively engaging, so it feels fast, but it actually takes a lot of time. The time it takes, with your hands already on the keyboard, to type ":w<CR>:e flashy.xml" is very short.

Its bizarre, as some of my friends do, to claim that you can do everything in vi as easily and quickly as it can be done with a visual word processor.

Ahh, but I'm not doing everything. I'm writing a book. Formatting it is a job for a program to do without bugging me about it.

I've no doubt for simple scripts and layout an experienced vi user can work at a fair clip, but there are a whole ton of tasks (like working with captioned images) that are just way, way better suited to the WYSIWYG environment.

I dunno. I was pretty happy with:

      <figure id="tradeoffs-macif">
        <title>Inactive (left) and Active window decorations for
        iSync, QuickTime Player, and Terminal under MacOS X 10.2</title>
        <graphic fileref="macif" srccredit="Peter Seebach, 2003">       
      </figure>

Hell I haven't written a book ... yet ... but I've written about 110 chapters of various books that never got finished, lots of articles (post xywrite) for various publications and tons of huge needs analysis and specification documents. I wish I could could come over there and take the word processor challenge against you, word for word, and see who gets the same document out in the fastest time using their tool of choice.

The more tweaking you do per document, the more useful WYSIWYG is, but even then, I tend to write in raw text and apply formatting at the end. What most of the writers I work with have learned is that, once you have your macros or DocBook stylesheet set up, you're done; you never have to think about the formatting again.

Hmm. Here's a frame of reference: I write about a thousand words an hour, give or take. When I was working on my book, I did about 20,000 words in a week, with all the formatting and images done correctly... Automatically.

On the other hand, we could just compare penis sizes

... I think the girls would kill me.

[wade-w]

Funny you should mention xywrite, Farren. My mother, who is as non-technical as you can get, but who is also a professional writer/editor, used to swear by it. She claimed she could get more done in less time with xywrite than with any other word processor that was on the market at the time.

This statement was not mere hyperbole; my father was writing a weekly syndicated column on computers at the time, so they got every word processor there was from the vendors for review purposes, along with all updates. (While he was writing that column, Dad used to get 2-3 pieces of software per day on the off chance he'd review it in a column; games, productivity software, office suites, you name, he got it, almost all unsolicited) They also devised a document designed to put the application through it's paces for comparison purposes. I'm told that xywrite was an order of magnitude more effecient than anything else.

Anyway, seebs is correct, imo. Using vi with a markup language such as docbook or some TeX variant is much more effecient than any modern word processor like Word or OpenOffice.

[Corona688]

No way. Use ed.

Ed, man!  !man ed

ED(1)               UNIX Programmer's Manual                ED(1)

NAME
     ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
     ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
     Ed is the standard text editor.

Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:

Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.

The Standard. Text Editor.

[Farren]

You all suck quite a lot. Linux I can understand, even commend. Ditto for C/C++. But ed!!!???? vi!!??!!!??? Geez. Join the rest of us in the twentieth century some time

[Farren]

Tell me something, do your cars have holes in front of the drivers seat so you can push them along with your feet, or bicycle-like pedals?

[Corona688]

Oh hell, I don't USE ed. Nothing except some deeply-embedded UNIX scripts use ed. I just thought it would be fun to point out the worst text editor in the history of mankind. Don't use vi, either, it's really efficient but I think you have to learn it from birth.

I do use nano, however; the UNIX-equivalent of MS-DOS edit, but with nifty features like programmable syntax highlighting.

This is because I do a hell of a lot of stuff remotely though. I logon to my home machine via ssh then do stuff from commandline. Commandline's not particularly useful under Windows, but under linux it's eerily powerful. On a properly-equipped machine I can even do graphical things remotely.

[Farren]

Originally Posted by Corona688

Oh hell, I don't USE ed. Nothing except some deeply-embedded UNIX scripts use ed. I just thought it would be fun to point out the worst text editor in the history of mankind. Don't use vi, either, it's really efficient but I think you have to learn it from birth.

I do use nano, however; the UNIX-equivalent of MS-DOS edit, but with nifty features like programmable syntax highlighting.

This is because I do a hell of a lot of stuff remotely though. I logon to my home machine via ssh then do stuff from commandline. Commandline's not particularly useful under Windows, but under linux it's eerily powerful. On a properly-equipped machine I can even do graphical things remotely.

I'll admit when you're connecting through a fancy cell phone at 9600 to a server command line rules.

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by Farren

I'll admit when you're connecting through a fancy cell phone at 9600 to a server command line rules.

command line rules for all sorts of things. Try renaming 300 files with a GUI interface - you can do it, but it'd take either incredible patience or some special-purpose GUI power tool.

If you're accustomed to a windows machine then I understand - windows console is bloody useless. It's aging, weak, inflexible, undocumented, bug-ridden, unhelpful, and hasn't really changed in 20 years. And even if someone were to port bash or korn to Windows(maybye someone has, I dunno) it'd still be useless since xcopy is just about the only good general-purpose utility left standing after 15 years of Microsoft's paring away.

It really doesn't compare to a modern shell with a full set of tools. I run a full-out gui at home, yet half the windows I have open tend to be consoles doing various things.

[seebs]

Authoring Web content with ed(1)

(Annoyingly, the filename spoils this.)

Seriously, though... If you want me to stop using vi, go ahead and recommend something that's faster for ACTUALLY WRITING. I spend very little time on formatting; that's why they have publication asssistants. I occasionally do XML, but it's not my JOB to line up margins, and time spent lining up margins is time spent not actually putting out words.

And yeah, Emacs is genuine competition. So's BBEdit.

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by seebs

And yeah, Emacs is genuine competition. So's BBEdit.

”On a normal ascii line, the only safe condition to detect is a ‘BREAK’ - everything else having been assigned functions by Gnu EMACS.” (By Tarl Neustaedter)

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Corona688

”On a normal ascii line, the only safe condition to detect is a ‘BREAK’ - everything else having been assigned functions by Gnu EMACS.” (By Tarl Neustaedter)

Heh. Well, there is a reason I use vi instead of emacs. I don't want a bunch of "mnemonics" I'll never remember; I want cursor keys grouped for my hand to use them.

[Ray]

Originally Posted by Corona688

If you're accustomed to a windows machine then I understand - windows console is bloody useless. It's aging, weak, inflexible, undocumented, bug-ridden, unhelpful, and hasn't really changed in 20 years. And even if someone were to port bash or korn to Windows(maybye someone has, I dunno) it'd still be useless since xcopy is just about the only good general-purpose utility left standing after 15 years of Microsoft's paring away.

Someone has ported not only bash, but a good collection of command line utilities (including cp) to Win32: MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) I've been using it for a year or so, and find it to approach the flexibility of a real Unix system.

[seebs]

There's also cygwin. Which is curiously very similar to an earlier project of porting GNU stuff to the Amiga.

[livius drusus]

Hi Ray! I have no idea what y'all are saying in this thread, but welcome to FF.

[Farren]

Originally Posted by Ray

Someone has ported not only bash, but a good collection of command line utilities (including cp) to Win32: MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) I've been using it for a year or so, and find it to approach the flexibility of a real Unix system.

Sweet. I'm downloading it. Thanks for the link.