Well, the kinds of bugs I've run into lately were (a) some weird combination of screens that crashes it (and Kevin sent me a fix in a couple of days) or (b) what turned out to be a poor algorithm for updating a list of recent searches. I had a macro that was doing hundreds of thousands of iterations and it was super-slow; eventually I proved that something like /a/; repeat * in a large file took F.O.R.E.V.E.R. With a proven test case, Kevin again turned it around more or less instantly (well, he was on vacation, so it took a couple of weeks, but more or less instantly once he got to it!).
And lest ye wonder, no, KEDIT wasn't the right place to be doing that work anyway. I changed it to use stream I/O and it was appropriately fast; once I got the fix, the KEDIT version was just as fast. It was actually a vaguely interesting program: given a word list, find words that map to each other via "rotation" (my word): take the first letter, move it to the end. So STRIPE becomes TRIPES becomes RIPEST. Useful? No. But a fun exercise in Rexx/Kexx. Under 50 lines of code. I found a list of over 400,000 words on the web, used that. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2025 3:06 PM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: Is HLASM efficient WAS: Telum and SpyreWAS: Vector instruction performance It's been decades, but I don't recall running into any KEDIT or Quercus REXX bugs. I liked it, but I had XEDIT macros for structured code entry that really needed something like SET PENDING. Sort of like ISPF models, but automatically dealing with indentation levels and multiple insertion points. E.g., if you requested insertion of an IF then you got blank lines after both the THEN and ELSE, with the blank lines disappearing if you hit ENTER without typing anything. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Mark Boonie <boo...@us.ibm.com> Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2025 2:51 PM To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> Subject: Re: Is HLASM efficient WAS: Telum and SpyreWAS: Vector instruction performance External Message: Use Caution In case my previous emails didn't make it obvious, let me add my name to the list of those who think Kedit is an outstanding product. The list of enhancements I'd like to see is short, and the list of buggy, erroneous, or otherwise wrong behavior is even shorter. The conversion of most of my Xedit macros to Kedit was effortless, and only a few required any real rework (and when I did the reworking I gave myself a better infrastructure for future tools as well). - mb > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> On > Behalf Of Robert Raicer > Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2025 1:59 PM > To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU > Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Is HLASM efficient WAS: Telum and SpyreWAS: Vector > instruction performance > > Around 1986 (I don't remember the exact date) I met Kevin Kearney, the > founder of the Mansfield Software Group and the developer of Kedit for DOS > (that's PC DOS) at a SHARE conference. To cut to the chase, I was intrigued > at the prospect of having an XEDIT-like text editor on a PC. I bought a > copy of Kedit as well as Quercus Rexx (which was developed by another fellow > and friend of Kevin Kearney, Charles Daney). Quercus Rexx was used as the > macro language for Kedit. Eventually, a subset of Rexx was implemented by > Mansfield and it became the integrated macro processor for Kedit; the macros > have a file type of KEX and a macro library is supported as a file type of > KML. Over the years I had the opportunity to be one of the beta testers for > Kedit for Windows. > > Kedit for Windows is still supported by Mansfield, although there has been > no new development on the product for quite some time. > > I still use Kedit nearly every day for all kinds of things. It has > definitely been one of the most reliable PC products I've ever used. > > While I was working as a developer at IBM I wrote many macros for Kedit for > Windows. A colleague of mine at IBM put together an elaborate set of Kedit > macros and OO Rexx code to produce a very nice development environment for > mainframe assembler as well as PL/X programming (assemblies/compiles could > be submitted directly from the Kedit environment, the assembly/compilation > listings would be made available directly in the environment as separate > Kedit sessions with highlighting used for flagged warnings and errors, there > was the capability to run IBM's internal source level debugger, and so on). > I wrote some PL/X code to use the JES SAPI to access the listings on the JES > Spool. And YES, virtually all of the modules we were developing for OS > components were written in mixed case, with upper casing performed as > appropriate (or > necessary) by the Kedit macros. This environment allowed us to perform a > significant amount of our code development work on Windows. > > I've been retired from IBM for almost a decade and I have no idea what has > become of that code. > > Bob
