Re: Mc Digest, Vol 70, Issue 3

[chris glur <crglur gmail com>]

Helmut wrote:-

> Don't top post - please!
> Don't full quote - please! (My full quote is just a bad example)

Yes I hate top-posters too. But:
I have to use gmail for this mail-list.
Which restricts me to a crappy web-based facility.
If I try to access via pop3, I'll be screwed, like when I accepted an
 additional goog-facility, which needed a biger password, and my previous
  email password became invalid.
The whole layer of extra complication with cookies ..etc. makes web-based
emailers bad.  Like I said adding complexity is bad.

Because gmail is problematic to 'initiate a new topic', I want to tell
this *here*:-
I had great productivity increase results with mc > cedit > User-menu/F11
for scheme-code.
My previous notes, stated that I didn't like the 'structured editor' facility,
because I had to lose sight of the text while the process inserted
the new text. Yes the annoyance of 'loss of sight of the subject' for half a
second, is related to the annoyance against top-posting ?

Once I'd accepted this small annoyance, and I'd patched cedits 'lisp' facilty
towards scheme, I found that the syntax-colouring and "just enter a
full structure
at a time instead of single-characters" was a MASSIVE productivity booster.
It's especially good for scheme, which has only a few syntax elements.

The beauty of such a system, is that when you work with a new language, or
a "haven't used for years" one, you re/familiarise yourself with the syntax
while building the cedit-templates. And 'capture' the knowledge of the syntax
-- that's how 'expert systems' work.  Then you don't have to waste your creative
mental resources on syntax trivialities. After all, an IfThenElse construct has
only 4 elements: its name, the predicate, the consequent, the alternate.

Why enter 6 keys for 'banana' when it's just a SINGLE-concept !?
I want to extend cedit's user-menu to be able to enter IDs once only, and then
just pick-them-off-a-menu for later inserting. Scoping won't be possible.

So: avoid complexity and adding too many features to mc/cedit, but I
found cedit's
syntax hi-lighting and template-inserting editor a big productivity booster.
The hi-lighting/colouring and predefined layout/pretty-printing makes eg. the 4
components of the IfThenElse construct evident/identifiable from amongst the
mess of brackets.

I can't understand why they haven't eliminated char-by-char code writing, and
replaced it by menu-driven -- a bit like spreadsheets. The only things
you need to
originate, besides the 'sequence', are ID names.
When you want to instruct an elevator to go to floor 9, you select ONE button,
instead of writing a syntactically valid message!?

== Chris Glur.