[Gllug] ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[Bruce Richardson]

On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 09:34:49PM +0100, Harry wrote:
> 
> Purely out if interest, is sed based on ed? I know sed stands for  
> stream editor, and I assume ed stands for editor, but is sed just an  
> ed for streams?

The progression is actually ed -> grep -> sed.  It's more a case of
inherited concepts rather than evolving code (although originally the
code for sed was lifted right out of ed by Ken Thompson).  Grep is named
for a sequence of ed commands (global/regular expression/print) that
were used so frequently in ed scripts that it made the case for a
specialised tool.  

Sed was originally called gres, the idea being that it would do a very
similar job to grep but with substitution.  Along the way, the developer
decided to add more functionality and he deliberately based the new
tool's command set on ed's commands because it had become so unversally
known; so he named the tool "sed" to reinforce that sense of
progression.

-- 
Bruce

If the universe were simple enough to be understood, we would be too
simple to understand it.
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