Talk:QED (text editor)

Pronunciation

Does anyone know the expansion of QED and how QED is pronounced ? Jay 14:04, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• I'm pretty sure it's "Qued," for Quick EDitor. Though I could readily be wrong. Λι ^t_c Θlοг-Шιlε 01:24, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
• I worked with David Tilbrook in the 70s and we always just called it "queue ee dee". 67.86.121.77 (talk) 14:01, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
• I used the original QED on an SDS 940 in 1968-72; it was QED then, Pronounced Queue Eee Dee, all caps because there was no lower case on Teletypes. I used QED on the GCOS system at Bell Labs Murray Hill in 1973-74; it was QED then too because Model 33 teletypes had no lower case -- but, note. Upper case input on a teletype implied lower case when setting text with Runoff, the GCOS ancestor of ROFF and TROFF on Unix. So, we began thinking of upper case as meaning lower case. By 1974, Bell Labs was beginning to get some GE Terminet terminals (1200 baud band printers) and Diablo terminals (300 baud daisy wheel printers); these had lower case, and interactive command line tools were modified to be case insensitive so you didn't need to hang on the shift key all the time. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 02:31, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

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Shouldn't the title be QED in capitals ? Jay 09:09, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• See above. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 02:31, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Power of QED

I have no reference but I know that FRED and UNIX QED were "grown" for many years and became quite powerful tools. Very different from EMACS, perhaps more like the Bourne Shell plus Perl. They were powerful scripting platforms.

Because the command language was designed for interactive editing, it is extremely terse and hence scripts can be hard to read.

I think that the scripting was sufficiently different that one would not contemplate moving a script between implementations. I know FRED's idea of quoting was very different from UNIX QED's. (Example: to quote a character to prevent it being evaluated during n interpretation passes took 2^n -1 backslashes in FRED but one backslash plus n-1 "c" characters on UNIX QED. \\\\\\\f vs \ccf) DHR (talk) 21:22, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

• QED on GCOS at Bell Labs Murray Hill was a very powerful scripting language. Many of the most common commands to the GCOS system were QED scripts. I still have the GCOS Advanced QED manual. Douglas W. Jones (talk) 02:31, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

History of QED

The link "An incomplete history of the QED text editor" is broken at the moment. The google cache however has an archived version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Rvh1IEHF2KcJ:cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/qed.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=en Hermel (talk) 11:19, 6 October 2013 (UTC)

Update: The link is fixed and works again: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/qed.html Hermel (talk) 19:20, 9 October 2013 (UTC)

Broken again. An anonymous user just posted a version that goes to bell-labs.co, which I found too fishy to leave on the Wikipedia. Archive.org doesn't have the cm.bell-labs.com pages, unfortunately. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 14:19, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

A version of QED was available for MVS/TSO (System/370) in the early 1980's. I installed it at the USC University Computing Center's Academic MVS system. I believe I may have a manual, if that would be appropriate to scan in and save. The link (which is working today) https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/qed.html has a reference to the TSO version. Larryplo (talk) 16:35, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

implemented?

WRT "developed by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch ... implemented by L. Peter Deutsch and Dana Angluin." What's the intended difference here between developed and implemented? What does it even mean to implement a program like this? Implement can mean to build something per a specification or to deploy a complex system. But, there is no specification here and this is not a complex system. Maybe we mean 'maintained' instead of 'implemented'. Stevebroshar (talk) 12:07, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

Ken Thompson wrote a version for CTSS and rewrote BCPL for Multics

WRT "Ken Thompson later wrote a version for CTSS; ... Thompson rewrote QED in BCPL for Multics": begs many questions.

He developed two versions/variants of QED? One for CTSS? and one for Multics? and the latter was a rewrite in that he used a different language (BCPL)? If so, what was the original QED written in?

Per the CTSS version: maybe that's a port (modifying the source code to work on another platform) and if so it's IMO misleading to say he wrote it. To write implies a relatively creative process of designing user experience and functionality; a significantly different accomplishment than a port. Both can be challenging and noteworthy, but porting is different than writing.

If he re-wrote it in BCPL, then in what sense is it a version of the original? A re-write is not what I'd call a version. Version typically implies a source code lineage which would not apply to a rewrite in another language. I might call it a variant. I guess re-write is ok too; just not version.

For any re-write, I wonder how faithfully it reproduces the functionality of the original. Sometimes, a re-write is functionally equivalent to the original: an exact clone. But, often a re-write is different; often considered improved over the original and sometimes omits features.

I think all of these questions should be addressed. Who knows the answers?

Here's an example of how to say what Thompson did (making some assumptions as to the details): Ken Thompson ported QED to CTSS... He also rewrote QED in BCPL (from the original language TBD) for Multics as a clone -- proving the same functionality without extension. Stevebroshar (talk) 15:36, 4 December 2025 (UTC)