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Date: Tue,  3 Nov 92 09:31:43 EST
From: zed-users@cs.psu.edu 
Reply-To: ZED Users Information Forum<zed-users@cs.psu.edu>
Subject: ZED Users Information Forum<zed-users Digest Volume 1 Issue 1
To: zed-users@cs.psu.edu


ZED Users Information Forum Tue,  3 Nov 92       Volume 1 : Issue   1 


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Bug Reports: zed-bugs@cs.psu.edu

Coordinators: K.T. Narayana and Sanjeev Dharap

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Today's Topics:

      Administrivia: Welcome!
      ZED Distribution Announcement
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Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 11:02:34 EST
From: narayana@oracorp.com
Subject: Administrivia: Welcome!

Welcome to the ZED Users Information Forum. It has been a long time
since we made the announcement about the availability of the ZED
specification environment. We thank you for your patient waiting
and the encouraging words in your inquiries. Finally we have set
up an FTP distribution regime for the alpha version 0.1 of the
ZED system. Some of the details about the system are given in
the next article. When you copy the system from the annonymous
FTP directory, please browse through the README file. 
If you encounter a problem with installing the software to the 
configuration of the Unix system on your machines, please let us 
know. We will assist you.

KT Narayana
Sanjeev Dharap 

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Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 11:04:39 EST
From: narayana@oracorp.com
Subject: ZED Distribution Announcement

\documentstyle[11pt]{article}
\begin{document}

\noindent Dear Colleagues:

Thank you very much for all your enquiries regarding the ZED
specification environment. We are very sorry to have taken this long
in responding to your request for further information.  Finally, we
have been able to set up an anonymous FTP distribution regime for the
ALPHA test version of the ZED environment. For reference, we call
this as the alpha version 0.1.

We give you a small brief about the environment before giving you
the details about the distribution regime.

\paragraph{Memory Requirements}

Incremental environments use a lot of memory to maintain the on-line
data structures. Version 0.1 of the ZED environment, made available to you, 
requires atleast 6M bytes of storage to execute in the minimal mode.
This includes the loading of the mathematical toolkit. 

The version supports, through a compile time constant, documents having
upto 1000 formal paragraphs. The ZED system makes use of this 
bound to set up some static data structures for maintaining
information about the graphic environment. You can install the
system to a default value desired by your installation. Suffice it
to say that if you increase the bound, you require larger amount of
memory.

In version 0.1, when a user quits editing a formal paragraph, all the
widgets associated with that object are destroyed. However, the parse
trees are retained. For a moderate sized paragraph, the parse tree
requires between 15K to 25K bytes of storage. Unfortunately this
retention needs memory. Therefore, as the size of the document
grows, the memory needs grow. In a future version, we will incorporate
features that will free the storage allocated to the parse tree, when the
user quits editing the object. When that is done, the system will
scale to arbitrary sized documents.

The ZED system has an integrated graph browser. Using the browser 
users can display the inheritance graph of the formal paragraphs in 
the specification document. The graph browser uses pix maps for the 
display. We are unable to provide accurate estimates of the memory used 
by the graph browser. Currently the browser is set to a default of 
4000 x 4000 pixels. Users can install the system to their needs. In 
version 0.1 of the ZED system, we do not fold the browser into an 
overlay structure.

In a future version, we hope to overlay the graph browser
data structure, so that users can browse the graph according to
a working set; we promise this only if the X-window system permits 
such features.

Given the above, for moderate sized documents, you may need 16M byte 
memory so that a \TeX process may be spawned with ease. 

We have desinged the system for minimal usage of memory.
However there is excessive fragmentation caused by the  memory allocators.
We hope to continually address some of these issues in future releases
so that the system achieves its design capability.

\paragraph{Recovery Procedures}

Intergrated with the ZED system is a recovery manager. The system 
maintains an on-line transaction log of user activity. If the system
crashes for any reason and restarted thereafter, the log is replayed
to establish a reasonable state of the editor. In general, the user may
loose atmost 20 key strokes of the editing.  

\paragraph{Style Macros}

The ZED system uses the zed.sty style macros and naming conventions.
Many of the Z users are generally familiar with the macros supplied from 
the Oxford Programming Research Group. Though we had our own macros, we 
did not use them for this reason. Please note that the environment 
macros are not needed. Only the macros for proper Z symbols of zed.sty
are used.

\paragraph{Design Notes}

Many people have asked us if we have written a document describing
the implementation of the ZED system. Because we were short of
manpower, we focussed our stretched resources on the implementation. 
Therefore we do not yet have any paper describing the implementation 
of the ZED system per se. We hope to write a paper in due course of time. 
However, there is a brief 4 page introduction to the ZED system in our 
technical report, ``Multi-User Distributed Specification Environments for Z''.
This report focuses on our current efforts in building a distributed
environment for Z. The ZED system is an important component of
that effort. The paper is available in the FTP directory.

\paragraph{Bug Reports and Questions}

We have created a mail alias
        
        zed-bugs@cs.psu.edu

for reporting about the bugs. Please restrict usage of this alias
to reporting bugs only.  For other questions that users
may have or requests or ideas, please use the alias
       
        zed-users-request@cs.psu.edu
 
We will collect all the contributions to this alias
in the form of an edited digest of the ZED Users Information Forum.
These edited digests will be sent to all the users.

\paragraph{FTP Regime}

You can obtain ZED distribution by anonymous FTP from

      ftp.cs.psu.edu

from the directory pub/ZED. Use you email address as the password.
The file INDEX gives a short description of all the files.

\end{document}

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