Editors (was: Storing source in IFS?)

["Buck" <buck.calabro@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> To steer away from Jihads, I think these choices
> have little to do with sanity, and a lot to do with
> what methodology one has been steeped in the
> most.

I regret taking up the bandwidth and promise this will be my one and only
post on this thread, but I can't let this slide.  Certainly JT is entitled
to his opinion but as one who is Very Steeped in Green Screen methodology,
my experience is completely different.  Every one of the midrange source
editors/tools stinks.  LIBMAN, POP, SEU, SEU, SEU, SDA, RLU - all are barely
adequate; a step above Windows Notepad.  For _decades_ the barest minimum a
programmers editor needed was a macro language to extend it.  XEDIT has it
on the mainframe but we never did.  Regular expressions?  Bzzzzt. Not for
us.  Intelligent scan & replace?  (RPG _IS_ column oriented.  If I want to
copy a block of code and change only the indicator columns, I can't, can I?)
Thwap!  Thank you Sir, may I have another?

My understanding was that IBM deliberately released sub-optimum editors to
help the third party market flourish.  Too bad it never happened, and we are
just stuck with dreck.  But it's from IBM, so we accept in the same manner
as Prometheus accepted Fire.

> But what would REALLY be a paradigm shift
> would be for the VB, Java, etc person to adopt
> toolsets which don't crash and have a
> well-thought-out UI.

Again, my experience differs greatly.  I am most assuredly NOT a PC guy, and
whatever VB, Java, etc. I have done is trivial.  But my experience is that
the PC editors rarely (if ever) crash on me.  And I use antique PC hardware;
very memory and CPU constrained.  My experience base crosses OS/2, DOS, Win
3.1, 95, 98, 2K.  Focussing not on editing PC files, but on editing midrange
source members, I have to say that the various incarnations of Brief,
Flex/Edit, Code/400, Vedit were all stable (Code/400 had install issues) and
I was (and am) more productive (well thought-out UI) with them than I ever
was with contemporaneous IBM editors.

Why did I respond?  Because my opinion is that we midrangers tend to see and
repeat similar thoughts (PC=bad, midrange=good) without actually taking the
time to find out how these editors work _for ourselves._  Certainly,
switching editors is not a trivial task, and no sane person could stand
among you all and claim that there is one editor for all programmers, on all
platforms.  But I strongly encourage anyone reading this thread to use a PC
based editor exclusively for a week before passing judgement on them all in
a few brief sentences.
  --buck