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Showing revision 1TECO, the
T{ape|ext} Editor and Corrector, is unique in the field of computing: it is the missing link between a text editor and a programming language. In technical terms, it is an imperative, Turing-complete programming language for editing text
. By virtue of this fact (we'll get into what that means later), it is also very, very
, very, very
' powerful. For now, know also that it's both the oldest single editor and the oldest family of text editors in use today (rarely - albeit there's no reason why this should be so).
TECO-1, so named because it runs on the Digital PDP-1 mainframe, was written way back when the chair in the Oval Office was warmed by LBJ's butt; it was soon followed by TECO-10, TECO-11, and TECO-12
By definition, a TECO has the following features:
- Every character is a command (this is not an understatement -
- Every command takes the form [-]n[@]X[arg$], where [-] is an optional negative sign, n represents an optional number (assumed to be one if absent), [@] represents a modifier symbol, X is the function to be performed (one character),
You can see it's not all that different from Vi or Vim: