🚀 go-pugleaf

>From GZ@MIT-MC Thu Aug 12 01:59:49 1982
I don't understand, what is the difference between doing

     <arg>   {move cursor down five lines} <lDelete>

and doing

  <set-mark> {move cursor down five lines} <Kill Region>

(aside from the fact that you can probably do a lot more things after a
 <set-mark> than after an <arg>) ?

If I guess right at what the "l" in lDelete stands for, you also need
<charDelete> and <wordDelete> and <pageDelete> and <s-expressionDelete> and
<C-statementDelete> and .... How is that limiting the number of commands?  With
Set Mark and Kill Region, you have all of those via a simple and consistent
mechanism.  But Kill Line et.al. exist and are heavily used despite that fact,
which would seem to indicate that they are not a great burden on anyone's
memory, and that users will opt for convinience over elegance.

I think that indeed there is a certain learning difficulty with any editor
which can *DO* a lot of things.  But I doubt whether this is directly related
to the structure of the command language. It's probably an individual thing - I
personally have an easier time learning simple associations than syntax, i.e.
I prefer to memorize ^K=kill line, ^W=kill region, over memorizing rules for
command arguments and qualifiers and modifiers and what not, no matter how neat
the designers think those rules are. But I'm sure there are other people who
are more comfortable with lots of syntax.  Probably an ideal editor would
provide both.