TECO
TECO
(editor, text)It was noted for its powerful programming-language-likefeatures and its unspeakably hairy syntax (see write-only language). TECO programs are said to resemble line noise.Every string of characters is a valid TECO program (thoughprobably not a useful one); one common game used to be predictwhat the TECO commands corresponding to human names did.
As an example of TECO's obscurity, here is a TECO program thattakes a list of names such as:
Loser, J. RandomQuux, The GreatDick, Moby
sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and then putsthe surname last, removing the comma, to produce thefollowing:
Moby DickJ. Random LoserThe Great Quux
The program is
[1 J^P$L$$J <.-z .="" :l="" g1="" i="" l="">$$
(where ^B means "Control-B" (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actuallyan alt or escape (ASCII 0011011) character).
In fact, this very program was used to produce the second,sorted list from the first list. The first hack at it had abug: GLS (the author) had accidentally omitted the "@" infront of "F^B", which as anyone can see is clearly the Wrong Thing. It worked fine the second time. There is no space todescribe all the features of TECO, but "^P" means "sort" and"J<.-z ...="" l="">" is an idiomatic series of commands for "doonce for every line".
By 1991, Emacs had replaced TECO in hacker's affections butdescendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomised) versionadopted by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and acouple of crufty PDP-11 operating systems, and ports ofthe more advanced MIT versions remain the focus of someantiquarian interest.
See also retrocomputing.
ftp://usc.edu/ for VAX/VMS, Unix, MS-DOS,Macintosh, Amiga.