Re: SEU versus vi and Vim

On 4/30/2014 5:16 PM, Evans Winner wrote:

Now, the only other family of editors that have something like Emacs Lisp
that I know of are actually the IBM editors like Xedit on the mainframe,
and some of its knock-offs, like The Hessling Editor. They can be
customized (to some extent, I'm not sure how much) and "macro-ified" using
Rexx.

A lot. Xedit is awesome compared to SEU.

Unfortunately, I have no more than trivial experience using Xedit
and family. The interface of SEU is similar to these editors, but as far
as I know, SEU cannot be extended with Rexx. What I'd really like to know
-- and it's a serious question -- is why not?

I think I recall hearing that IBM deliberately left SEU... er, simple in
order to allow a 3rd party to sell a better one. To allow an ISV market
to grow without IBM competition.

I know almost nothing about Code/400, but I have this notion that there
was an editor called LPEX that was similar to Xedit and used Rexx as an
extension language. Not sure though. Maybe nobody cared.

I keep my copy of Code/400 on my Win 7 PC specifically for the Rexx
macro capability. The current editor in RDi is also called Lpex but is
not the same, as it is an Eclipse plugin. Extending that requires a
fair amount of not only Java, but the documentation of the bits you want
to extend. As Lpex is IBM proprietary material, this documentation is
also proprietary.
--buck