Date: Mon, 1 Aug 94 16:16:25 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Less for DOS

Astoundingly Mike Castle said:
   Amazingly enough Marty Leisner said:
   > less 2.00 was just released on prep...
   > 
   > When we settle down on djgcc 2.0, it would be worthwhile to port...
   > 
   > Also, is there a port of elvis to djccc?
   > 
   > When we get version 2.0 stable, I'm going to look into porting nvi to
   > dos...

   Are these worthwhile ports to DJGPP?  DJGPP provides a great
   enviroment for porting/developing memory hungry and cpu
   intenstive programs, but for file intensive programs, it just
   plain sucks.  Take a look at the port of the FSF fileutils:
   they're just plain slow.  Unless someone wanted to take the time

Fileutils = cat, rm, cp, etc, I assume.  The textutils such as grep,
gawk, and so on are not noticeably slower (nor faster, and I haven't
done any timings) on trivial regexps such as 'grep "Amazingly enough"
*' to find all Mike Castle replies, and much faster for complicated
ones.
    The point being that it doesn't take much computation for DJGPP to
catch up to real mode programs.

[ ... stuff omitted ... ]

   I'm not saying that these shoudln't be done, but if you want to
   be able to show off DJGPP, try a useful package that would be
   better suited to the environemnt.  How about Oleo, the FSF's
   spreadsheet package?  Certainly it would be about evenly divided
   between being memory/cpu bound and io bound.  Heck, you could
   even do an X port of it if you have DV/X.  Hey, how about a port
   of emacs that supports X for use with DV/X?  

For emacs + DV/X, there are three such.  Oemacs (based on GNU Emacs
19.19) has one; I can't get it to work (after loading OEmacs in X
windows version, my system has a 4-minute half-life).  Henrik Storner
has done one based on GNU Emacs 19.25.  Morten Welinder is in the
proccess of integrating his own changes into 19.26 (I think he said).
He made noises on comp.os.msdos.desqview that suggest to me (don't
blame him if I've interpreted it wrong) that this version will be
integrated in the 19.26 or so FSF distribution of GNU Emacs.
    OEmacs is available on all Simtel mirrors.  Storner's version is
available on QDeck.COM.  Last I saw it was in /upload/emacs-19.25.
I'm not sure where or when Morten's version will be available, or if
we simply must wait for the relevant update of GNU Emacs.

   I think more care should go into what one should consider to
   port.  Rather than doing everything in site, take a closer look
   and see if it will benefit from what DJGPP has to offer.  I would
   hate to see ports done, and then be unacceptable, perhaps even
   unusable due to perfromance reasons; and I honestly feel these
   three proposed packages would suffer.  If they do have the poor
   performance (or even slower performance compared to their 16bit
   cousins) then it will reflect poorly upon DJGPP.

   -- 
   Mike Castle .-=NEXUS=-.  Life is like a clock:  You can work constantly
     mcastle AT cs DOT umr DOT edu     and be right all the time, or not work at all
      mcastle AT umr DOT edu       and be right at least twice a day.  -- mrc
       We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen

Poor performance is in the eye of the beholder.  One suspects that a
DJGPP less is more like to catch the eye of DJGPP users than GNUish
less.  (Presumably that's how less came to garbo.)  I certainly rarely
look at GNUish ports any more.  (This could change in the near future,
as apparently recent updates of the GNUish utilities and DJGPP make
may make them usable for complicated FSF and X Consortium makefiles
and imakefiles, whereas the Backus FSF ports and others have certain
bugs in them that make them unusable for that purpose.)  So if a DJGPP
port brings a usable implementation of an excellent program to the
notice of people....

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                           Stephen Turnbull                            |
|     University of Tsukuba, Institute of Socio-Economic Planning       |
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|                                                                       |
|                Founder and CEO, Skinny Boy Associates                 |
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