KEYPAD Programming Kit                              January 26, 1987
    ======================
     
        Prepared by William R. Garland for DECUS.
     
                        Wm. R. Garland, Manager
                        Computer Services (Medicine)
                        Health Sciences Centre
                        St. John's, Nfld.
                        A1B 3V6

        INTRODUCTION       The following is a precis of an article from the
        ------------       MUN Faculty of Medicine Computer Services Newsletter.
     
        Those of you who have been around long enough to remember line-
        oriented editors will remember the great improvement in personal
        productivity that occurred when keypad editting arrived. People used
        to the many DIGITAL operating systems (RSTS/E, RSX, RT-11, VMS, TOPS)
        will know about TECO. TECO, which stands for Text Editor and COrrector,
        is an editor extraordinaire, which allows one to write editting
        programs, that is, programs which operate on text files (such as
        manuscripts, programs, documentation, etc.). One of the fancier features
        of TECO is VTEDIT, for Video Terminal EDITor, which is a TECO program
        that made one's screen come alive by providing instant feedback about
        the content of one's file by always displaying an up-to-date, screen-
        sized window into the file, and which allowed single keystroke commands
        to perform editting functions (such as search and replace, cut and
        paste, advance or backup in the text by a specified entity such as
        paragraph, sentence, word).
     
        There were some technical problems with TECO on the older systems,
        especially in that it was a resource hog. TECO was, however, a
        'freebee', written by dedicated hacks and provided to DECUS members.
        As such, it was an 'unsupported product'. There were some thirty-five
        or forty different versions of TECO over the years, and many survive
        today. Eventually, however, DIGITAL was forced to provide a 'supported'
        video editor, and they invented EDT, which did many of the things TECO
        did, although not all, but a few others as well. EDT became the standard
        text editor, and its most important feature was, again, keypad editting.
        EDT itself has now become old and is being replaced by TPU, the Text
        Processing Utility, which is the subject of another article.
     
        The point of all this is that the use of the keypad to provide single
        keystroke commands went a long way towards providing the individual
        programmer and other users with some of the power of the computer with
        which to perform editting tasks. The same phenomenon has occurred at the
        operating system level on VMS. One can now define keys to perform DCL
        (DIGITAL Command Language) commands, and, now that I am using these
        features, I wonder how I ever did things before.
     
        .....
     
        This programming kit includes the command files and a small patch
        one must apply to one's LOGIN.COM file in order to do use the keypad
        effectively. Individuals will want to start with blank files and
        define keys for themselves as they go. Crucial to the process is
        the DEFINE/KEY command, which is well DECumented.
     
        You should already be beyond the novice stage to use these tools,
        however, because it is vitally important that you understand fully the
        steps in the program development cycle and the concepts of symbols and
        logical names used on VMS. Also, you should be able to invent many new
        tools of your own to add to the kit. Send me feedback, if you wish.