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Re: Guile in Emacs
From: |
Thomas Lord |
Subject: |
Re: Guile in Emacs |
Date: |
Tue, 13 Apr 2010 18:47:19 -0700 |
On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 21:13 +0200, Christian Lynbech wrote:
> >>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:
>
> >> Wouldn't it be about as good (and probably less work), to give up on the
> >> guile idea and evolve emacs lisp (with Miles's lexical-bind changes, and
> >> (one hopes) multithreading, and maybe other things)?
>
> Thomas> I dunno. Maybe. I'd guess that, no, that's not a
> Thomas> good strategy. Four reasons come quickly to mind: ...
>
> Wouldn't a reasonable alternative to using a scheme implementation be to
> use a Common Lisp ditto?
I would have a hard time arguing conclusively that that
would be unreasonable.
Scheme is tidier and more compact and yields more
interesting subsets. I think that Scheme currently
enjoys way more R&D than CL. So I'd be on Scheme over
CL for the general GNU extension language (not just
for Emacs). And I don't suppose that legacy Emacs
lisp code should in any way be allowed to hold back or
mess up the design of a GNU extension language.
But there are are good arguments both ways and
I think you are right that a CL "ditto" might be
a good alternative.
> And wouldn't that be a much closer fit
> semantically to the current Emacs Lisp dialect?
Yes, I think it would. I'm free enough in my current
position in life that I can afford to be cavalier and
say "Eh, who cares about all that tonnage of extant
Emacs lisp code. What's the Right Thing if we discount
that code?" I can't sell you or anyone on that attitude
and it might just be flat out wrong. It's just, at least,
a position worth considering in the "big picture".
> I kind of hear you suggesting ditching all of the existing Emacs Lisp in
> favour of starting over from scratch with scheme.
Yeah, I am, but I don't see anyone who is an obvious
candidate to take on such a huge job with no guaranteed
success at the end. As I said (and the scare-quotes are
significant): it's something that "someone" should do.
> While it will be easy to list examples of existing libraries few will
> miss, emacs killer features such as gnus or org-mode still represent
> significant investments that are not easily reproduced from scratch.
Sure. But don't misunderestimate the rapidity with
which a programmer fluent in both Emacs lisp and Scheme
can sit down and port those programs from one language to
the other. (The one that really scares *me* is calc.el!)
-t
>
>
> ------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
> Christian Lynbech | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
> ------------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
> Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
> - address@hidden (Michael A. Petonic)
- Re: Guile in Emacs (was: integer overflow), (continued)
- Re: Guile in Emacs (was: integer overflow), Richard Stallman, 2010/04/12
- Re: Guile in Emacs (was: integer overflow), Thomas Lord, 2010/04/12
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Bruce Stephens, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Thomas Lord, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Stefan Monnier, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Thomas Lord, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Christian Lynbech, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Bruce Stephens, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, joakim, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Christian Lynbech, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs,
Thomas Lord <=
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Christian Lynbech, 2010/04/13
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, christian.lynbech, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Thomas Lord, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Bruce Stephens, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Jose A. Ortega Ruiz, 2010/04/14
- Re: Guile in Emacs, christian.lynbech, 2010/04/15
- Re: Guile in Emacs, Richard Stallman, 2010/04/14
- RE: Guile in Emacs, Drew Adams, 2010/04/14