STORY
TOTO Text Editor Floating-Point Line Numbers
TOTO Text Editor Floating-Point Line Numbers
- In the mid-1970s, Steve Salta and Jonathan Kirwan of Superior Software Services in Beaverton hired me for my very first paid commercial programming contract: authoring an interactive text editor in HP 2000 BASIC.
- We named the software TOTO (Terminal Oriented Text Organizer).
Floating-Point Line Insertion
- Because terminal screens and teletypes had no graphical cursor addressing, line editors were standard.
- TOTO introduced a clever approach to line numbering using floating-point line numbers:
- Initially, lines were numbered consecutively, e.g., lines
1through100. - To insert new lines between existing lines without having to immediately renumber the entire document, a user could execute commands like:
`text move line 10 to line 4.5` - We developed clever algorithms to handle moving whole blocks of lines (such as moving lines
6through8before line4as3.5,3.6,3.7) and automatically normalizing fractional line numbers back to integers.
- Initially, lines were numbered consecutively, e.g., lines
From TOTO to TOTO II
- The first release (TOTO) was limited strictly to manipulating text strings.
- The subsequent version introduced support for handling mixed-type files containing both text strings and floating-point numeric data.
- With these combined capabilities, the upgraded editor was officially christened TOTO|TOTO II ("Toto, too!"—deliberately fulfilling the Wizard of Oz pun).
- See IDES Viral Spread and the TOTO Text Editor Gig.
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.