Classic programming

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Sun Aug 9 10:32:01 CDT 2015


> On Aug 9, 2015, at 11:25 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> ...
> There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it
> could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc
> - it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared
> between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene
> did that.

There was a TECO compresser TECO macro, but that is a more limited beast: it simply would compress out any spaces between commands, and convert string delimiters to their short form.  This definitely did make them smaller and slightly faster, as well as harder to read.

There was also, on TOPS-10, a TECO that would read the command string and compile it into machine code, then execute the result.  I think it came from Stevens University, but that may just be a confused memory.  

	paul




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