zz: User Prefs & Additions, incl. Choice of Editor

[Ted Nelson <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folx--

WITH REFERENCE to user preferences and additions--

1)  Andrew and I talked originally about leaving a hole
 / aperture / intake for user's code, so that user-developed
 code would always be brought in by each new version.

In my perusals of Perl materials I ran into such a function,
 but I didn't mark it.

SO anyhow the user could have various files
 with certain names that meet the criteria and are
 co-compiled whenever ZigZag runs.

2)  Isn't there some simple test of what kind of machine
 the program is running on?

IF SO, couldn't we say
If Unix, default => emacs
If PC, default => WordPad
If Macintosh, default => SimpleText

3)  Then if the user has some other preference,
 that can be expressed in external code which is
 brought in at run time.

Or is this hopelessly naive?

Best, T


At 12:05 PM 11/17/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>> >> Should we start to differentiate a bit between architectures with,
>> >> say, Unix.pm and Windows.pm modules?  
>> 
>> I would like to avoid that if at all possible.
>
>In this particular case, it may not be possible.  The details of
>figuring out what the user's favorite editor is or what editors are
>available are necessarily going to vary from system to system.
>
>> Going to a Save format, for instance, 
>>  which is fully in text mode: one long scroll
>>  for cell text contents, then a bunch of ASCII
>>  representing the cells themselves and their pointers
>>  to the text scroll.
>
>Certainly the save format should not depend on the platform.
>
>
>
____________________________________________________
Theodor Holm Nelson, Visiting Professor of Environmental Information
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