Re: coding text editor

Perhaps you can manage to convince to author of the toy program you
use for posting to usenet that preserving the line (or even paragraph
structure) of the text would be more sensible than forcing it into the
'well-kown' Windows-invented 'comb structure' ...

Well i'm 99,99% sure that Google is using Linux or a BSD for there
non critical web servers, so i think it's best that you as a Fanboy
ask them to do this.

Independently of this, it ocasionally pays to become familiar with
something before declaring it to be obsolete for some weird reason.


Quoting from the linked paper (I have not read it entirely, because I
have no actual interest in text editing):

The more sophisticated sequence data structures keep the
sequence as a recursive sequence of spans of text. The line
span method keeps each line together and keeps an array or a
linked list of line pointers.

Yes but they are AFAIK pointer into the buffer. They are not C
strings.
This has advantages and disadvantages. What you really need is a
datastructure
that let you attach arbitrary data to each line. As i said, text
editors can be
really complicated - the part to represent text and do simple insert/
delete is
pretty irrelevant. And try to implement a column editing mode with
this datastructure
(all that keep spans of text), this will make you crazy. By the way:
Do VI and Emacs
have column editing modes?

.