I want to know who came up with the Anchor Points idea for Copy/Paste. I had an idea like that back when I was using PalmOS. Whenever I needed to copy stuff that flowed past a single screen, it was hell trying to do that. I'd invariably under or over-shoot. Had I been able to set a start point and move to an end point and have it all selected, that would have been marvelous. I wish I had done a post about it way back when. I would have been Prior Art.
Emacs works the same way. You set an anchor (the mark) and the region implicitly spans the text between the anchor and the cursor (the point). This kind of stateful approach (as opposed to a stateless alternative such as holding down shift while sweeping out a selection) has several advantages even when using a keyboard and mouse. E.g. you can set the mark and then do a search or any other action that might modify the point.
