Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[Alessandro Piras]

LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com> writes:

> Hi
>
> I doubt that Python would be a good choice, Perl for instance has much
> more in common with LISP.
>
> And I doubt that eLISP is the reason why many people have problems
> with emacs, it's more that many "modern" GUI mechanisms and
> terminologies are not default in emacs, which frustrates newbies.
>
>
> IMHO an alternative (but compatible ) eLISP-dialect simply allowing to
> swap parens and functionnames and to write "message(...)" instead of
> "(message...)" would increase the acceptance immidiately.
Sounds Like M-expressions. It has been tried in the past in the Lisp world,
without much success. Most programmers realize after few time the
sweetness of S-expressions and macros. I think it would just lead to a
small amount of M-expressions code that would be soon refactored as
S-expressions.. Not worth the effort I suspect.
>
> (just think of how the different syntaxes of VBScript and JScript run
> on the same engine)
>
> But the biggest issue are the data structures, most "modern" script
> languages have extensive support for _dynamic_ "hashes" and "arrays",
> but not for "linked lists" which is the main structure in elisp.
>
> No real idea how this could be solved...
>
> cheers
>   Rolf
>
> PS: forgot to mention this Slasheritis in regexes, IIRC Xemacs has
> already rawstrings while GnuEmacs users are forced to escape every
> regex symbol at least twice...

__
Alessandro