Hey Franz: 32K Windows SUCK!!!!!
Jim Veitch
Devin Hosea (ho...@interi.com) wrote:
> WHY DON'T THEY FIX THEIR EDITOR SO IT CAN HANDLE FILES LARGER THAN 32K?
Turns out that the editor limitation arose from 2 different problems:
first, MS Windows imposed a 32K limit on edit controls, and second,
ACL for Windows uses 16-bit fixnums, which are used (for speed) to
index files in the editor.
The first limitation is gone (actually raised to 128K), but the second
remains. The lifting of the first limit came too late to permit us to
take a serious look raising this limit in our upcoming 3.0 release
(due out in a couple of months), but we will take a very serious look
at removing the limit by the following release after this one. We
agree that this is a very important enhancement.
However, we supply an alternative: a pretty nice interface (EDITI)
between WinEmacs (a port of Xemacs to Windows) and ACL for Windows.
WinEmacs can handle arbitrarily large files, understands the CL syntax,
and permits fine-grain communication between the Lisp and the Editor.
It may not be completely integrated, but we have internal developers who
use WinEmacs & EDITI by choice, not because of the 32K limitation.
You can try out WinEmacs by contacting in...@pearlsoft.com.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Veitch Internet: j...@franz.com
Franz Inc., http: //www.franz.com/
1995 University Avenue, Phone: (510) 548-3600
Berkeley, CA 94704. FAX: (510) 548-8253
ACL Unix FAQ: ftp.uu.net:/vendor/franz/faq
ACL Windows FAQ: ftp.uu.net:/vendor/franz/acl4w-faq
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Dubuque
Date: 11 Sep 1995 22:46:51 GMT
WHY DON'T THEY FIX THEIR EDITOR SO IT CAN HANDLE FILES LARGER THAN 32K?
When will Franz fix this problem!? Will ACL3.0 have bigger editor
windows? (They promised me that 2.0 would, but it doesn't).
Does anyone know of any way to fix or fudge this problem?
The solution is to use the EDITI interface between ACL and
Win-Emacs. Win-Emacs is a MS-Win port of XEmacs 19.6 (a
cutting-edge fork of GNU Emacs version 19). With Win-Emacs
you have access to a huge library of free (GPL) GNU Emacs
code for every purpose you could imagine. In addition,
EDITI provides some unique XEmacs extensions specially
tailored for Lisp (e.g. a fast code colorizer FontiFly,
Auto-Tags mode for automatic updating of tags tables
(definition indexes), full completion over tag table
definition names, including method specs (also
auto-updates), tight integration with ACL for remote
evaluation and remote invocation of tools such as arglist,
apropos, describe, documentation, macroexpand, etc). This
interface is just as good as what was available on any Lisp
machine, and in some ways even better.
It would be ridiculous for a Lisp vendor to try to
duplicate the functionality of a full programmers editor
like Emacs in a resident lisp editor even without the 32K
MS-Win edit control limitation.
Take EDITI and Win-Emacs for a test drive. If you're like
everyone else who has, you'll never again have any need for
the toy resident ACL editor.
A free nagware version of Win-Emacs is available from Pearl
software (despite being called a "demo" it is fully
functional and precisely the same as the commercial version
except for a nag screen that pops up every half-hour or so.
In particular, EDITI will work fine with the demo version).
For instructions on how to ftp the Win-Emacs "demo" send
mail to in...@pearlsoft.com for an auto-reply with further
info on Win-Emacs.
Last I heard, Franz ACLWIN customers are eligible for a
special deal on Win-Emacs. Contact Franz or Pearl for
details.
-Bill
D. Erway
By the way, under Win-NT, we can use the standard distribution GNU Emacs,
rather than Win-Emacs.
Has anyone done this and interfaced it with ACL?
Don