Re: Elisp development news

[Ken Raeburn]

Alex Schroeder <address@hidden> writes:
> > Like I indicated, my long term "plan" has been to try to get
> > something working well enough to demonstrate to the Emacs folks that
> > it's practical and beneficial to make the change.
> 
> Gerd has stepped down as maintainer and RMS is maintaing Emacs again.

Yes, and my impression is that RMS is more interested in converting to
Guile than Gerd was.  But I haven't brought up the issue recently.

> I don't think Emacs people have anything against Guile as an extension
> language -- they just don't want to do the work.  If we present them
> with a working example, then maybe we can start discussing a merger.

Yes, that's what I'd like to do.  But an example that works *well* is
better than one that works poorly. :-)

> I think most Emacs folks would love to see threading and closures, for
> example.

Aside from myself, I don't think I've heard anyone talking about any
of this, but I don't have the bandwidth to keep up on all the email.


BTW, did anyone read Michael Sperber's paper in the recent ACM ... um,
I think it was ICFP proceedings?  (Don't have it with me and I'm not
familiar with the conference.)  It's on converting from Emacs Lisp to
Scheme, and trying to generate readable, maintainable Scheme in the
process.  Specifically, figuring out when dynamic bindings can be
replaced with lexical bindings.  Looks like a big win to me, though it
probably requires more extensive analysis than we'd want to do at load
time for every elisp package...

Ken