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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: In- and Out-of- core editors (was Re: Which one, Lisp or Scheme?)
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In article <32F7963E.47EC659F@intelligent.co.uk>, Simon Brooke
<simon@intelligent.co.uk> wrote:

> -- Guys, I am not the enemy. We are all on the same side --
> 
> In a text editor, any character is individually selectable and
> individually changeable. In a structure editor, only complete structural
> elements are selectable or changeable. How this is presented -- as
> pretty-printed text, or as a three-dimensional graph hanging in space[1]
> is irrelevent.
> 
> Structure editors may *show* structure as text (or they may not); but
> they don't allow you to *manipulate* structure as text. To assert that
> two things are alike because their surface representation is alike is to
> miss the point entirely, in my opinion.

Actually, a student of mine once built what you would call a structure editor,
in that the internal representation was a tree-structure, but whose 'surface
structure' looked, and could be edited like, text.  So there may not be such
a clean distinction.
