On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:57:50 -0400, John Passaniti
JapanIsShinto.com> wrote:
> Regardless, most Forth development these days is not under blocks. But
> that's fine because the number-of-line constraints you apparently love
> of old-school Forth development have been a part of programming for
> years and continue today. I remember watching a interview with Gracie
> Hooper saying that she knew a routine was probably too complicated if it
Grace Murray Hopper. Please. She deserves to be remembered correctly.
She also liked to give out nanoseconds of wire, FWTW.
> was more than an "pinch" worth of punch cards. Programmers pounding out
> code with their DECWriter terminals would know things were getting out
Nit: DECwriter (lc w). Also DECprinter, DECtape, DECsystem, etc.
Yes, it was silly, but makers (usually) get to name their products.
> of control if it took more than a page of green-bar paper. And until
> bitmapped displays with arbitrary windows existed, every video terminal
> system had a fixed line limit.
>
Not every. The vast majority of video terminals were character-cell
devices with a fixed width and height, or at most a choice among a few
(two, maybe three or four) fixed layouts.
But that was not the only video display or (hence) terminal style.
"Vector" displays as they were usually called could position at
arbitrary and varying distances. Vector CRTs usually had some limit on
the number of entities (points, lines, often arcs, sometimes complete
characters and/or subroutines) that could be held in memory
(especially terminals, which couldn't leech onto host memory), and
also on the amount of drawing that could be done before the refresh
cycle gave the viewer headaches. But vector storage-tubes, led
(dominated?) by Tektronix, could draw an effectively unlimited amount,
dot-addressable -- although doing it on a remote terminal over a
typical 110 or maybe(!) 300 baud line could be agonizingly long.
Regardless of the display or other presentation format, of course,
there remains a limit on how much the human brain can satisfactorily
comprehend at once
-- although IME this does vary somewhat from one
brain to another, and (even) from one situation/content to another.
In fact my paragraph above is a little bit longer than I normally
like. But I don't have enough time to make it shorter.
- formerly david.thompson1 || achar(64) || worldnet.att.net
