Favourite text based word processing software

On Sun, 14 Dec 2014 15:37:08 +0000, Peter Corlett wrote: You know, it could always be worse. In my first year studying engineering, a poor soul from the Computer Science faculty was sent over to give 240 of us a one hour a week lecture in writing rudimenary FORTRAN IV programs on an IBM System/370 based system which we got to access in line mode using ADM-5 terminals. By the end of the year, most of the class had managed to successfully compile a simple program and had a vague idea about how to read data from a file, perform calculations on it and write it out to another file, basic stuff that many engineers would find a useful foundation for solving more complicated problems using computers. In second year, the lecturer was replaced by a new guy from Computer Science who clearly hadn't spoken to the previous guy about our prowess and interest in computer programming. He breezed in and opened the first lecture with: "I suppose you are all familiar with 6800 assembly language programming?" and took it from the general lack of reaction that we probably were. In reality most of the class had no idea what he was talking about and those that did were too taken by surprise to reply. His first assignment to us was to write some sort of part 6800 simulator using the same FORTRAN IV system we had been using the previous year but now with (just about) full screen access on the ADM-5's, provided you could master the escape sequences needed to generate the equivelant of function keys to work the editor. The FORTRAN compiler (WATFIV) only had what it called "structured programming" (IF/THEN/ELSE and WHILE/ENDWHILE) and novelties like (fixed length) character variables because it sported extentions from the standard and it mainly saw its role in life as preventing us from accessing anything on the system that might be remotely useful for this particular task. It liked everything to start at one and had a deep hatred of anything that started at zero. It also liked to issue obscure error messages whenever anyone typed any input it didn't like and delighted in making it difficult to trap these errors and replace them with something more meaningful. Why am I mentioning all this? This guy's assignment to us later in the year was to write some vague approximation of a word processor using the same FORTRAN IV setup. I think the idea was to read in words typed at the terminal and format them newspaper column style with nice straight left and right margins. (Did I mention that the system could only reluctantly be persuaded to deal with lower case? As for dynamic memory allocation? Not a chance.) Many years after performing this somewhat less than useful task, my advice is: don't write your word processor in FORTRAN IV on an IBM S/370. (I'm expecting Fred will probably have something to say about college administrators about now.) Regards, Peter Coghlan.