FreeDOS Mavens,
I'm thinking of editing Edlin to match historical behavior after
downloading a 1982 IBM DOS manual and a 1987 Microsoft OS/2 manual I
found floating around the 'Net. I want to make Edlin still the small
program it has always been without adding things that would make the
executable super-huge, so I want to get some feedback from the list
before I do anything. The things I am considering are below:
1. At the beginning of the program, when Edlin reads the file whose
name is on the command line, the historical thing to do is output
"End of input file" if the entire input file has been slurped in or
"New file" if the file does not exist yet. FreeDOS Edlin just runs
the same code as the T command to slurp the file in and give the
output of that command, which is the number of lines read.
2. The IBM DOS manual adds "#" as the line number that's one beyond the
last line. This should be an easy add that doesn't change existing
behavior.
3. The historical behavior for the Q command is to always verify that
the user wanted to quit the program with an "Abort edit (Y/N)?" message.
4. Historically, the E command erased any backup copy (i.e. the file
with the .BAK extension) after writing and before quitting. I don't
know if I want to emulate this behavior.
I'll probably come up with some more. I am reluctant to add strings to
Edlin, though, because it would make Jerome's i18n project more hairy.
Nevertheless, part of the project's goals are to emulate historical
behavior and eliminate hysterical behavior. There's a lot more there
that I want to tackle just as soon as I figure it out, but I want to
tackle the low-hanging fruit first. What do the list-subscribers say?
Gregory
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