Program editors should not abandon text oriented commands

ABSTRACT

In the past few years, a number of program structure editors have appeared. These editors provide a number of very useful commands which interact with a program viewed as a parse tree. Unfortunately, rather than just adding these commands to those already available, these editors have typically eliminated all (or most) text oriented commands. As a result, the users are forced to use the structure oriented commands all (or most) of time whether they want to or not.This note argues that text oriented commands are very useful and should be retained. There is no reason why a program editor cannot support both text and structure commands.

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