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XTEC - compiling TECO #1618

Open larsbrinkhoff opened 5 years ago

larsbrinkhoff commented 5 years ago

MRC; .XTEC. (INIT)
MRC; TS XTEC
MRC; XTEC 434 (timestamp 1976-12-02)
MRC; XTEC MAC
MRC; XTEC MAN
MRC; XTEC ORDER

XTEC is a TECO compiler for the DECSYSTEM-10. It runs under TOPS-10 or ITS (under the compatibly package) This program is available from the DECUS program library. Its order number is DECUS-10-264. It was written Jack W. Krupansky and Mark R . Crispin at Stevens Institute of Technology. The version in the DECUS library is %0(427), submitted in February of 1976. As far as I know, this is the latest version.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_dectecoMob_3120242/page/n13

larsbrinkhoff commented 5 years ago

This was the situation when I worked at MIT in the summer of '76. I had brought with me my own favorite TECO-style editor, which, although it had only the functionality of primitive DEC TECO, had two interesting facilities: (1) it compiled all TECO programs (including commands) prior to execution, and (2) it had multi-character register names, which greatly increased the number of possible TECO registers to virtually infinite.

https://blog.djmnet.org/2008/08/05/origin-of-emacs/

larsbrinkhoff commented 5 years ago

XTEC (acronym for eXperimental TECo), a powerful general purpose text editor, is intended to be a replacement for TECO, XTEC is a superset of TECO. XTEC is not merely a "modified TECO", but a total rewrite. XTEC is a compiler, rather than an interpreter. This means that macros execute much faster. One benchmark took 30 seconds under TECO, 2 seconds under XTEC. An equivalent program written in SNOBOL took 10 seconds. XTEC has infinitely extendable push-down lists. This means that a ?PDL error will never occur. Many, many macros that lose under TECO because of this condition will win under XTEC. XTEC has many command extensions listed in the documentation. Most of these are based on the Stevens extensions to DEC TECO, however, many additional features are added. The user of TECO should be able to adapt to XTEC without too much difficulty. XTEC has been tested under 506B and 602 on the Stevens DECsystem-10. In addition, a singles-egment variant of XTEC has been run on the ITS monitor at MIT on KA and KL-10's. The program has not yet been tested on TENEX or on a KI/KL-10 running TOPS-10, however, it is believed that XTEC will function properly on these systems.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/decus/programCatalogs/DECUS_Catalog_PDP-10_Apr78.pdf

larsbrinkhoff commented 5 years ago

Co-authored by @JackKrupansky.