Documentation of Portable Standard Lisp editor

[simon-brooke]

Hi

Excellent project, congratulations. I am an enormous fan of structure editors; I cannot understand why anyone should prefer a text editor.

I've OCRed the editor documentation for Portable Standard Lisp; I have somewhere the documentation for BBC Lisp, and I'll try to dig that out and scan it tonight.

I'm pretty sure Harlequin Common Lisp had a structure editor by 1987, but I can't absolutely swear to that; it's the product now sold as LispWorks.

Cheers

Simon

[JonathanWolfe]

You have an unclosed back-tic at hash variables

[JonathanWolfe]

copious extra lines here at the end

[simon-brooke]

Thanks, fixed these.

[shaunlebron]

Thanks for taking the time to scan/transpose this document!

I think I'll host my own copies of these lisp manuals using github release assets, in case these links go down, as they tend to do. That'd be great if you could scan a PDF copy. If not, the markdown file is fine too.

The most interesting thing to me is the hash variables, so wrapping an s-expression could be done with r and typing (#0).

Do you happen to know if this is runnable anywhere? I don't understand parts of the point movement styles and i'm not sure what the "explode" command does.

I read through Chapter 17 of http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/utah/USCP-Portable_Standard_LISP_Users_Manual-TR_10-1982.pdf and it looks like a beefier (but teletype-only) version of the one described in your 1985 manual

[simon-brooke]

"Explode", in PSL, takes any argument and returns a list of characters, the characters being those that prin would return.

PSL is available from here; it compiles and runs, but the image which runs does not have either fedit or sedit; PSL is also available as part of the Reduce distribution from here but although I can get that version to compile I can't get it to run. The binary distribution available from that site is a binary of reduce complied in PSL; there isn't a separate Lisp compiler/interpreter as part of that distribution.

[simon-brooke]

I don't have PDF copies, I only have very ancient printed books ;-)