Re: WYSIWYG Editor in Self ?

[Rainer Blome <rainer@physik3.gwdg.de>]

> Emacs is a prototype for an extensible (but ASCII) editor.

Yes, I'd like that, a prototype-based Emacs.  And a prototype-based
TeX would be cool, too.  The obvious generalization is to integrate
the two(*).

For many languages, Emacs does some parsing of source text for
various purposes like indentation, sanity checks and fontification.
Representing the text as objects (akin to a `parse' tree) would
simplify and speed up things a lot.  In `native mode', the
persistent representation of such a tree would be the tree itself
(in binary form).  In `compatibility mode', the tree would be
written out in and parsed from a flattened (ascii) form.

WYSIWYG displaying of a text would then mean to render the tree,
possibly just to human-readable ascii form.  Real WYSIWYG like with
word processors has a lower priority for me.


Rainer

(*) and a shell and a scripting language and an interface to Tk ...