On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 12:58 PM, James H. H. Lampert
<jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
SEU, even without syntax checking, is light years ahead of vi.
I strongly disagree with this. Without syntax checking, vi is
light-years ahead of SEU... for editing the kinds of things you would
normally edit on a Unix (or similar) system. Even something
tremendously simple like preserving the indentation level of the
previous line is completely absent in SEU. Never mind regex
searching. And on the terminals that most people use to connect to
Unix boxes, there is color, and vi (or at least vim) can be configured
to syntax highlight various programming languages.
The bulk of SEU's value (and its complexity) is its syntax checking.
(Here I'm including anything RPG- or CL-specific like the optional
column guides, F4-prompting, etc.) Without syntax checking, it is
reduced to little more than EDTF, which even Notepad eats for lunch.
The issue that most IBM midrangers seem to have with vi is the same as
what most people have: It takes time to learn to use effectively if
you're already used to using something else. But I can level the same
claim against SEU. After using vi and emacs (as well as Notepad and
the like) throughout college, SEU was horribly unintuitive to me. I
mean grotesquely unintuitive and cumbersome. (As was practically
everything on the AS/400! And yes, I was using an actual AS/400 when
I got out of college.)
For general-purpose editing, as someone who has used a lot of editors
on a lot of platforms, I can tell you SEU is definitely near the
bottom. (It's ahead of things like Unix's ed and DOS's EDLIN.) For
RPG and CL, SEU suddenly lands pretty near the top, despite any
handicaps that the text-only interface may impose. To me, it's the
hands-down winner for RPG II/III, even ahead of the modern
Eclipse-based offerings.
John
midrange.com
