<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>
<title>sciteco/src/help.cpp, branch v2.5.2</title>
<subtitle>Scintilla-based Text Editor and COrrector</subtitle>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/'/>
<entry>
<title>THE GREAT CEEIFICATION EVENT</title>
<updated>2021-05-30T01:12:56+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Robin Haberkorn</name>
<email>robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2021-05-30T00:38:43+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/commit/?id=432ad24e382681f1c13b07e8486e91063dd96e2e'/>
<id>432ad24e382681f1c13b07e8486e91063dd96e2e</id>
<content type='text'>
This is a total conversion of SciTECO to plain C (GNU C11).
The chance was taken to improve a lot of internal datastructures,
fix fundamental bugs and lay the foundations of future features.
The GTK user interface is now in an useable state!
All changes have been squashed together.

The language itself has almost not changed at all, except for:

* Detection of string terminators (usually Escape) now takes
  the string building characters into account.
  A string is only terminated outside of string building characters.
  In other words, you can now for instance write
  I^EQ[Hello$world]$
  This removes one of the last bits of shellisms which is out of
  place in SciTECO where no tokenization/lexing is performed.
  Consequently, the current termination character can also be
  escaped using ^Q/^R.
  This is used by auto completions to make sure that strings
  are inserted verbatim and without unwanted sideeffects.
* All strings can now safely contain null-characters
  (see also: 8-bit cleanliness).
  The null-character itself (^@) is not (yet) a valid SciTECO
  command, though.

An incomplete list of changes:

* We got rid of the BSD headers for RB trees and lists/queues.
  The problem with them was that they used a form of metaprogramming
  only to gain a bit of type safety. It also resulted in less
  readble code. This was a C++ desease.
  The new code avoids metaprogramming only to gain type safety.
  The BSD tree.h has been replaced by rb3ptr by Jens Stimpfle
  (https://github.com/jstimpfle/rb3ptr).
  This implementation is also more memory efficient than BSD's.
  The BSD list.h and queue.h has been replaced with a custom
  src/list.h.
* Fixed crashes, performance issues and compatibility issues with
  the Gtk 3 User Interface.
  It is now more or less ready for general use.
  The GDK lock is no longer used to avoid using deprecated functions.
  On the downside, the new implementation (driving the Gtk event loop
  stepwise) is even slower than the old one.
  A few glitches remain (see TODO), but it is hoped that they will
  be resolved by the Scintilla update which will be performed soon.
* A lot of program units have been split up, so they are shorter
  and easier to maintain: core-commands.c, qreg-commands.c,
  goto-commands.c, file-utils.h.
* Parser states are simply structs of callbacks now.
  They still use a kind of polymorphy using a preprocessor trick.
  TECO_DEFINE_STATE() takes an initializer list that will be
  merged with the default list of field initializers.
  To "subclass" states, you can simply define new macros that add
  initializers to existing macros.
* Parsers no longer have a "transitions" table but the input_cb()
  may use switch-case statements.
  There are also teco_machine_main_transition_t now which can
  be used to implement simple transitions. Additionally, you
  can specify functions to execute during transitions.
  This largely avoids long switch-case-statements.
* Parsers are embeddable/reusable now, at least in parse-only mode.
  This does not currently bring any advantages but may later
  be used to write a Scintilla lexer for TECO syntax highlighting.
  Once parsers are fully embeddable, it will also be possible
  to run TECO macros in a kind of coroutine which would allow
  them to process string arguments in real time.
* undo.[ch] still uses metaprogramming extensively but via
  the C preprocessor of course. On the downside, most undo
  token generators must be initiated explicitly (theoretically
  we could have used embedded functions / trampolines to
  instantiate automatically but this has turned out to be
  dangereous).
  There is a TECO_DEFINE_UNDO_CALL() to generate closures for
  arbitrary functions now (ie. to call an arbitrary function
  at undo-time). This simplified a lot of code and is much
  shorter than manually pushing undo tokens in many cases.
* Instead of the ridiculous C++ Curiously Recurring Template
  Pattern to achieve static polymorphy for user interface
  implementations, we now simply declare all functions to
  implement in interface.h and link in the implementations.
  This is possible since we no longer hace to define
  interface subclasses (all state is static variables in
  the interface's *.c files).
* Headers are now significantly shorter than in C++ since
  we can often hide more of our "class" implementations.
* Memory counting is based on dlmalloc for most platforms now.
  Unfortunately, there is no malloc implementation that
  provides an efficient constant-time memory counter that
  is guaranteed to decrease when freeing memory.
  But since we use a defined malloc implementation now,
  malloc_usable_size() can be used safely for tracking memory use.
  malloc() replacement is very tricky on Windows, so we
  use a poll thread on Windows. This can also be enabled
  on other supported platforms using --disable-malloc-replacement.
  All in all, I'm still not pleased with the state of memory
  limiting. It is a mess.
* Error handling uses GError now. This has the advantage that
  the GError codes can be reused once we support error catching
  in the SciTECO language.
* Added a few more test suite cases.
* Haiku is no longer supported as builds are instable and
  I did not manage to debug them - quite possibly Haiku bugs
  were responsible.
* Glib v2.44 or later are now required.
  The GTK UI requires Gtk+ v3.12 or later now.
  The GtkFlowBox fallback and sciteco-wrapper workaround are
  no longer required.
* We now extensively use the GCC/Clang-specific g_auto
  feature (automatic deallocations when leaving the current
  code block).
* Updated copyright to 2021.
  SciTECO has been in continuous development, even though there
  have been no commits since 2018.
* Since these changes are so significant, the target release has
  been set to v2.0.
  It is planned that beginning with v3.0, the language will be
  kept stable.
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
This is a total conversion of SciTECO to plain C (GNU C11).
The chance was taken to improve a lot of internal datastructures,
fix fundamental bugs and lay the foundations of future features.
The GTK user interface is now in an useable state!
All changes have been squashed together.

The language itself has almost not changed at all, except for:

* Detection of string terminators (usually Escape) now takes
  the string building characters into account.
  A string is only terminated outside of string building characters.
  In other words, you can now for instance write
  I^EQ[Hello$world]$
  This removes one of the last bits of shellisms which is out of
  place in SciTECO where no tokenization/lexing is performed.
  Consequently, the current termination character can also be
  escaped using ^Q/^R.
  This is used by auto completions to make sure that strings
  are inserted verbatim and without unwanted sideeffects.
* All strings can now safely contain null-characters
  (see also: 8-bit cleanliness).
  The null-character itself (^@) is not (yet) a valid SciTECO
  command, though.

An incomplete list of changes:

* We got rid of the BSD headers for RB trees and lists/queues.
  The problem with them was that they used a form of metaprogramming
  only to gain a bit of type safety. It also resulted in less
  readble code. This was a C++ desease.
  The new code avoids metaprogramming only to gain type safety.
  The BSD tree.h has been replaced by rb3ptr by Jens Stimpfle
  (https://github.com/jstimpfle/rb3ptr).
  This implementation is also more memory efficient than BSD's.
  The BSD list.h and queue.h has been replaced with a custom
  src/list.h.
* Fixed crashes, performance issues and compatibility issues with
  the Gtk 3 User Interface.
  It is now more or less ready for general use.
  The GDK lock is no longer used to avoid using deprecated functions.
  On the downside, the new implementation (driving the Gtk event loop
  stepwise) is even slower than the old one.
  A few glitches remain (see TODO), but it is hoped that they will
  be resolved by the Scintilla update which will be performed soon.
* A lot of program units have been split up, so they are shorter
  and easier to maintain: core-commands.c, qreg-commands.c,
  goto-commands.c, file-utils.h.
* Parser states are simply structs of callbacks now.
  They still use a kind of polymorphy using a preprocessor trick.
  TECO_DEFINE_STATE() takes an initializer list that will be
  merged with the default list of field initializers.
  To "subclass" states, you can simply define new macros that add
  initializers to existing macros.
* Parsers no longer have a "transitions" table but the input_cb()
  may use switch-case statements.
  There are also teco_machine_main_transition_t now which can
  be used to implement simple transitions. Additionally, you
  can specify functions to execute during transitions.
  This largely avoids long switch-case-statements.
* Parsers are embeddable/reusable now, at least in parse-only mode.
  This does not currently bring any advantages but may later
  be used to write a Scintilla lexer for TECO syntax highlighting.
  Once parsers are fully embeddable, it will also be possible
  to run TECO macros in a kind of coroutine which would allow
  them to process string arguments in real time.
* undo.[ch] still uses metaprogramming extensively but via
  the C preprocessor of course. On the downside, most undo
  token generators must be initiated explicitly (theoretically
  we could have used embedded functions / trampolines to
  instantiate automatically but this has turned out to be
  dangereous).
  There is a TECO_DEFINE_UNDO_CALL() to generate closures for
  arbitrary functions now (ie. to call an arbitrary function
  at undo-time). This simplified a lot of code and is much
  shorter than manually pushing undo tokens in many cases.
* Instead of the ridiculous C++ Curiously Recurring Template
  Pattern to achieve static polymorphy for user interface
  implementations, we now simply declare all functions to
  implement in interface.h and link in the implementations.
  This is possible since we no longer hace to define
  interface subclasses (all state is static variables in
  the interface's *.c files).
* Headers are now significantly shorter than in C++ since
  we can often hide more of our "class" implementations.
* Memory counting is based on dlmalloc for most platforms now.
  Unfortunately, there is no malloc implementation that
  provides an efficient constant-time memory counter that
  is guaranteed to decrease when freeing memory.
  But since we use a defined malloc implementation now,
  malloc_usable_size() can be used safely for tracking memory use.
  malloc() replacement is very tricky on Windows, so we
  use a poll thread on Windows. This can also be enabled
  on other supported platforms using --disable-malloc-replacement.
  All in all, I'm still not pleased with the state of memory
  limiting. It is a mess.
* Error handling uses GError now. This has the advantage that
  the GError codes can be reused once we support error catching
  in the SciTECO language.
* Added a few more test suite cases.
* Haiku is no longer supported as builds are instable and
  I did not manage to debug them - quite possibly Haiku bugs
  were responsible.
* Glib v2.44 or later are now required.
  The GTK UI requires Gtk+ v3.12 or later now.
  The GtkFlowBox fallback and sciteco-wrapper workaround are
  no longer required.
* We now extensively use the GCC/Clang-specific g_auto
  feature (automatic deallocations when leaving the current
  code block).
* Updated copyright to 2021.
  SciTECO has been in continuous development, even though there
  have been no commits since 2018.
* Since these changes are so significant, the target release has
  been set to v2.0.
  It is planned that beginning with v3.0, the language will be
  kept stable.
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>updated copyright to 2017</title>
<updated>2017-03-03T14:32:57+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Robin Haberkorn</name>
<email>robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2017-03-03T14:32:20+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/commit/?id=0bbcd7652a948424156968298e4d2f27b998cfe2'/>
<id>0bbcd7652a948424156968298e4d2f27b998cfe2</id>
<content type='text'>
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>optimized RBTree: avoid unnecessary virtual RBTree and RBEntry implementation classes</title>
<updated>2016-11-20T04:54:44+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Robin Haberkorn</name>
<email>robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-11-20T04:27:10+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/commit/?id=19675a1a4899f68a4e7afbd45cebc63b544650e4'/>
<id>19675a1a4899f68a4e7afbd45cebc63b544650e4</id>
<content type='text'>
 * whenever the implementation class was not exactly RBEntryType,
   it had to have a virtual destructor since RBTree cared about
   cleanup and had to delete its members.
 * Since it does not allocate them, it is consistent to remove RBTree::clear().
   The destructor now only checks that subclasses have cleaned up.
   Implementing cleanup in the subclasses is trivial.
 * Consequently, RBEntryString no longer has to be virtual.
   HelpIndex and GotoTables are completely non-virtual now
   which saves memory (and a bit of cleanup speed).
   For QRegister, not much changes, though.
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
 * whenever the implementation class was not exactly RBEntryType,
   it had to have a virtual destructor since RBTree cared about
   cleanup and had to delete its members.
 * Since it does not allocate them, it is consistent to remove RBTree::clear().
   The destructor now only checks that subclasses have cleaned up.
   Implementing cleanup in the subclasses is trivial.
 * Consequently, RBEntryString no longer has to be virtual.
   HelpIndex and GotoTables are completely non-virtual now
   which saves memory (and a bit of cleanup speed).
   For QRegister, not much changes, though.
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>optimized red-black trees and common base class for string-keyed RB trees</title>
<updated>2016-11-19T23:24:40+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Robin Haberkorn</name>
<email>robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-11-19T17:34:52+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/commit/?id=f9e6f8630cdb0c6d056154b82e8f94289509f48a'/>
<id>f9e6f8630cdb0c6d056154b82e8f94289509f48a</id>
<content type='text'>
 * the old implementation tried to avoid template programming by
   making the entry comparison function virtual.
 * The new RBTree implementation takes a template argument with the
   implementation of RBEntry. It is now partially conventional
   that the template argument must be actually derived from RBTree::RBEntry
   and must define a "compare" method.
 * As an advantage we now get static polymorphism (avoiding virtual
   calls and allowing for more compiler optimizations) and the
   the RBEntry implementation no longer has to be virtual.
 * The only RB-Trees actually used are string-keyed, though.
   Therefore there's a common base class RBTreeString now which
   defines two synonymous "key" and "name" attributes.
   * The entry base class RBEntryString is virtual again because
     we do not want to propagate the RBEntryType template parameter
     even further and the RBTree base class needs to destroy
     entries.
     This might be avoided by not defining a RBTree::clear() method,
     leaving this task to the implementations.
     At least QRegisters have to be virtual, though.
   * RBTreeString only depends on the strcmp() and strncmp() functions
     used now and only case-sensitive and case-insensitive versions
     are actually required, so we instantiate these templates statically
     in rbtree.cpp.
     This means there are still only two instantiations of the RBTree
     in the binary.
   * RBTreeString defines convenient wrappers for find() and nfind()
     to look up by string.
     This uses the RBEntryString base class, so no allocations whatsover
     are required for lookups and less space is wasted on the call stack.
   * A RBEntryOwnString base class is also provided which frees the
     implementations from memory managing the tree keys.
   * RBTreeString can now be used to add other common functionality
     like auto-completions for Q-Registers, goto labels and help topics.
 * some minor optimizations
 * updated TODO
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
 * the old implementation tried to avoid template programming by
   making the entry comparison function virtual.
 * The new RBTree implementation takes a template argument with the
   implementation of RBEntry. It is now partially conventional
   that the template argument must be actually derived from RBTree::RBEntry
   and must define a "compare" method.
 * As an advantage we now get static polymorphism (avoiding virtual
   calls and allowing for more compiler optimizations) and the
   the RBEntry implementation no longer has to be virtual.
 * The only RB-Trees actually used are string-keyed, though.
   Therefore there's a common base class RBTreeString now which
   defines two synonymous "key" and "name" attributes.
   * The entry base class RBEntryString is virtual again because
     we do not want to propagate the RBEntryType template parameter
     even further and the RBTree base class needs to destroy
     entries.
     This might be avoided by not defining a RBTree::clear() method,
     leaving this task to the implementations.
     At least QRegisters have to be virtual, though.
   * RBTreeString only depends on the strcmp() and strncmp() functions
     used now and only case-sensitive and case-insensitive versions
     are actually required, so we instantiate these templates statically
     in rbtree.cpp.
     This means there are still only two instantiations of the RBTree
     in the binary.
   * RBTreeString defines convenient wrappers for find() and nfind()
     to look up by string.
     This uses the RBEntryString base class, so no allocations whatsover
     are required for lookups and less space is wasted on the call stack.
   * A RBEntryOwnString base class is also provided which frees the
     implementations from memory managing the tree keys.
   * RBTreeString can now be used to add other common functionality
     like auto-completions for Q-Registers, goto labels and help topics.
 * some minor optimizations
 * updated TODO
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>the manual generator (generator-docs.tes) has been cleaned up and is now called tedoc.tes</title>
<updated>2016-11-18T06:25:00+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Robin Haberkorn</name>
<email>robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-11-16T15:30:46+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/commit/?id=be39ab9fdbaba118ece1dcc3e064c8452fcdd277'/>
<id>be39ab9fdbaba118ece1dcc3e064c8452fcdd277</id>
<content type='text'>
 * some code simplifications
 * it now supports command line arguments via getopt.tes.
 * the -C flag enabled C/C++ mode.
   By default tedoc parses SciTECO code which means it can be used
   to document macro packages as well.
 * Therefore it is installed as a separate tool now.
   It may be used as a Groff preprocessor for third-party macro
   authors to generate (wo)man pages.
 * there's a man page tedoc.tes(1)
 * The troff placeholder macro is now called ".TEDOC".
 * Help topics can now be specified after the starting comment /*$ or !*$.
   Topics have been defined for all built-in commands.
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
 * some code simplifications
 * it now supports command line arguments via getopt.tes.
 * the -C flag enabled C/C++ mode.
   By default tedoc parses SciTECO code which means it can be used
   to document macro packages as well.
 * Therefore it is installed as a separate tool now.
   It may be used as a Groff preprocessor for third-party macro
   authors to generate (wo)man pages.
 * there's a man page tedoc.tes(1)
 * The troff placeholder macro is now called ".TEDOC".
 * Help topics can now be specified after the starting comment /*$ or !*$.
   Topics have been defined for all built-in commands.
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>implemented self-documenting (online) help system</title>
<updated>2016-11-18T06:05:52+00:00</updated>
<author>
<name>Robin Haberkorn</name>
<email>robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com</email>
</author>
<published>2016-02-26T01:02:50+00:00</published>
<link rel='alternate' type='text/html' href='https://git.fmsbw.de/sciteco/commit/?id=e7867fb0d9979c550e6e3d7597ece73b680c4af6'/>
<id>e7867fb0d9979c550e6e3d7597ece73b680c4af6</id>
<content type='text'>
 * the new "?" (help) command can be used to look up
   help topics.
 * help topics are index from $SCITECOPATH/women/*.woman.tec
   files.
 * looking up a help topic opens the corresponding "womanpage"
   and jumps to the position of the topic (it acts like an anchor
   into the document).
 * styling is performed by *.woman.tec files.
 * Setting up the Scintilla view and munging the *.tec file
   is performed by the new "woman.tes" lexer.
   On supporting UIs (Gtk), womanpages are shown in a variable-width
   font.
 * Woman pages are usually not hand-written, but generated from manpages.
   A special Groff post-processor grosciteco has been introduced for this
   purpose. It is much like grotty, but can output SciTECO macros for styling
   the document (ie. the *.woman.tec files).
   It is documented in its own man-page.
 * grosciteco also introduces sciteco.tmac - special Troff macros
   for controlling the formatting of the document in SciTECO.
   It also defines .SCITECO_TOPIC which can be used to mark up
   help topics/terms in Troff markup.
 * Woman pages are generated/formatted by grosciteco at compile-time, so
   they will work on platforms without Groff (ie. as on windows).
 * Groff has been added as a hard compile-time requirement.
 * The sciteco(1) and sciteco(7) man pages have been augmented with
   help topic anchors.
</content>
<content type='xhtml'>
<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
<pre>
 * the new "?" (help) command can be used to look up
   help topics.
 * help topics are index from $SCITECOPATH/women/*.woman.tec
   files.
 * looking up a help topic opens the corresponding "womanpage"
   and jumps to the position of the topic (it acts like an anchor
   into the document).
 * styling is performed by *.woman.tec files.
 * Setting up the Scintilla view and munging the *.tec file
   is performed by the new "woman.tes" lexer.
   On supporting UIs (Gtk), womanpages are shown in a variable-width
   font.
 * Woman pages are usually not hand-written, but generated from manpages.
   A special Groff post-processor grosciteco has been introduced for this
   purpose. It is much like grotty, but can output SciTECO macros for styling
   the document (ie. the *.woman.tec files).
   It is documented in its own man-page.
 * grosciteco also introduces sciteco.tmac - special Troff macros
   for controlling the formatting of the document in SciTECO.
   It also defines .SCITECO_TOPIC which can be used to mark up
   help topics/terms in Troff markup.
 * Woman pages are generated/formatted by grosciteco at compile-time, so
   they will work on platforms without Groff (ie. as on windows).
 * Groff has been added as a hard compile-time requirement.
 * The sciteco(1) and sciteco(7) man pages have been augmented with
   help topic anchors.
</pre>
</div>
</content>
</entry>
</feed>
