obs. 1. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO
editor in one of its infinite variations (see below). 2. vt.,obs.
To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used! This
usage is rare and now primarily historical.
2. [originally an
acronym for '[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector'; later, 'Text
Editor and COrrector'] n. A text editor developed at MIT and
modified by just about everybody. With all the dialects included,
TECO might have been the most prolific editor in use before
EMACS, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its
powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably
hairy syntax. It is literally the case that every string of
characters is a valid TECO program (though probably not a useful
one); one common hacker game used to be mentally working out what
the TECO commands corresponding to human names did. As an example
of TECO's obscurity, here is a TECO program that takes a list of
names such as:
Loser, J. Random
Quux, The Great
Dick, Moby
sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and then puts the
surname last, removing the comma, to produce the following:
Moby Dick
J. Random Loser
The Great Quux
The program is:
[1 J^P$L$$
J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K :L I $ G1 L>$$
(where ^B means 'Control-B' (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actually
an 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 a bug: GLS
(the author) had accidentally omitted the '@' in front
of 'F^B', which as anyone can see is clearly the Wrong Thing. It
worked fine the second time. There is no space to describe all the
features of TECO, but it may be of interest that '^P' means
'sort' and 'J<.-Z; ... L>' is an idiomatic series of commands
for 'do once for every line'.
In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the dust of history,
having been replaced in the affections of hackerdom by EMACS.
Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted
by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty
PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced
MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest.
See also retrocomputing, write-only language.
