[Tfug] Holy Wars!

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, John,

--- John Karns <johnkarns at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Bexley Hall
> <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >  Under *DOS*, I fell in love with Brief (inspired
> by
> >  EMACS but probably 100X faster!)
> >
> >  Unfortunately, Borland (Inprise?) never released
> >  it after buying it from Solution Systems...  :<
> >  (it has some nasty timing loops that just don't
> >  work well on machines running 100-1000X faster
> >  than the original machines on which it ran  :< )
> 
> Unfortunately, it contained bugs far more serious
> than that.  Namely,
> a _really_ nasty bug in that it either
> 
> a) wouldn't do garbage collection after
> de-allocating memory used for
> running macros,

Hmmm... I never noticed that -- and I *lived* in
Brief for several years (on a 16MB 386, no less!)
 
> - or -
> 
> b) wouldn't release de-allocated memory to the heap.
> 
> It may have gone un-noticed by the majority of
> users, but anyone who
> used a major macro package (remember dBrief?) would,
> depending on how
> extensively that person used the macros, eventually
> find himself
> staring at the fatal message "all memory exhausted"
> dialog box, then
> be unceremoniously dumped at the Dos prompt after
> acknowledging the
> message.

I used their set of "C" macros (Cbrief?) but never
had a problem.  <shrug> Maybe quitting brief to
run the ICE was enough to keep "reseting" things...

<shrug>
 
> Quickly to follow would be the gnashing of teeth to
> an extent in
> proportion to the product of the interval of time
> that had passed
> since the last global file save and the number of
> modified file
> buffers that had yet to be saved to disk.
> 
> I have no idea to what extent Borland used the Brief
> code (ISTR that

I think most of the code was probably *not* very
portable.  IIRC, the earlier versions were written
in ASM86.

> they used it to replace / augment the editor used in
> their various IDE
> packages), but I doubt that the macros included were
> large enough to
> trigger the problem very often, if the bug was still
> crawling around
> in the code.  Perhaps Borland fixed or minimized it
> ...
> 
> There was a contemporary to Brief, called
> "MultiEdit" that was for the
> most part, syntax compatible to Brief.  Scratch that
> - Brief macro
> syntax was very Lisp-like, while ME's was more

I always thought of brief as "C constructs in
LISP syntax".  Not hard to get used to.

> C-like, IIRC.  ME
> didn't seem to suffer from the memory allocation
> problem, so was much
> more stable.  dBrief was ported to ME.
> 
> </dos editor trivia>
> 
> -- 
> John
> 
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