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Sed Port! (With IDE?)

Created: 2022-10-19

Updated: 2023-10-26

I’ve discovered the immense education value of porting-software.

In preparation for mushrat, and just because I know it will lend amazing insights, I plan to port a sed implementation.

I’ll almost certainly port it to Zig
I’m eyeing the busybox implementation (github.com/mirror) because it’s just 1,600 lines (though I’m debating also porting the regex implementation, which will make this a whole other endeavor)…
(I would also like to take a look at the other busybox editors like ed and vi, and the awk implementation - all found at the above source dir))
I’d really like to make a tiny IDE for sed because some of its more arcane features seem like they might actually be made comprehensible if you could actually see what’s going on.

Another idea

Turtle graphics (as in LOGO) are an amazing way to actually see what you’re programming in a way that makes it very obvious how changes to your program affect the output.

Is there some way to visualize what sed is doing (often, the failure of a short sed program, due to, say, a regex typo, is fairly opaque because nothing comes out).

Is there some way not only to make sed visual, but also to make a complete "micro world" around it as in Seymour Papert's ideas for computer environments for experimentation and play?