| Abstract: | CHEF is an interactive text editor for use with both printing and display terminals. Its prime field of application is computer source program editing but it has some word processing capabilities that make it useful for documentation and general text editing work. There is a comprehensive set of whole-line operations, including block moves and the insertion of text from external files, together with substring replacement and line segmentation based on a flexible pattern-matching algorithm. There is a set of one-line buffers for temporary storage of lines or command strings and complex command sequences can be built up by macro substitution. Considerable effort has been made to design a command syntax that is flexible and consistent and, at the same time, minimizes effort during the editing process. CHEF copies the user's file into an internal work-space so that the original is not disturbed until the user is satisfied with the results of the editing session. A virtual memory technique is used to provide a work-space that can be almost any desired size, with random access to any part and efficient editing operations. CHEF is written in BCPL and has already been implemented on four different machines. |
