Re: [TUHS] Software Archeology: QED

Leah Neukirchen: I tried contacting David Tilbrook several times and got no replies. I think some people around Toronto still use qed, but they seem to be very secretive about it. ==== David is likely well-retired by now, but I don't really know. Even though I walk within a block of his house fairly often, we've never really been consistently in touch. But he was responsible for a distinct branch of the qed that originated at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s (same one Rob supplied). Certainly worth tracking down. I don't know your definitions of `people around Toronto' or `secretive.' I still use qed daily; my copy is one I've been carrying around, and occasionally tweaking, since my time at Caltech (where I got it from Rob). I'll send Arnold a copy. I'm really tired both of having to recompile it (and deal with yet another bit of obsolete-C assumption that no previous compiler or C library has shown up) now and then, and with its private variant of regular expressions, so I keep threatening (mainly to myself) to rewrite it in Python, but I have no idea whether I'll ever get around to that. If I do I suspect I'll throw away some of the programmability hooks, which I never use, and perhaps extend it here and there (I really want nesting globals, and they're not that hard to do--I did them in my half-baked personal mail reader, which has an ed-like interface). I don't know offhand of anyone else around Toronto using my branch of qed. I do know of a couple of friends in California, one who left Caltech before I did but is now back there, another elsewhere in Los Angeles, who still use my version at least occasionally. It wouldn't surprise me if there were people around Toronto who use Tilbrook's branch, since it was part of his qef toolkit and he introduced several companies to it when consulting for them; but I don't know of any specifics. None of which is as archaeologically interesting as the non-UNIX qeds, of course. Norman Wilson Toronto ON