Re: Guile in Emacs

[<christian.lynbech@tieto.com>]

>>>>> "RMS" == Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

RMS> Common Lisp is extremely complicated and ugly.  When I wrote GNU Emacs
RMS> I had just finished implementing Common Lisp, and I did not like it
RMS> much.  It would bloat Emacs terribly, and documenting it would be hard
RMS> too.

Fair enough, I happen to disagree but I respect that you have real-life
experiennce in the matter.

I do not understand the point about documentation though. Why would it
be harder to document a common lisp based emacs than a scheme based
emacs? I do not expect that we would like to make a brand new common
lisp from scratch but rather to start out from an exisiting
implementation, just as we would with scheme.

RMS> Scheme is elegant, and it is a better direction to move in.

I will challenge the claim that emacs-on-scheme would be any less
bloated than an emacs-on-cl. Sure, core scheme is smaller than core
common lisp, but once you have finished adding all of the stuff you need
to get a working application, I believe you will have reached pretty
much the same level of bloat.

RMS> Since we have our own Scheme implementation, we should use that one.
RMS> If it has a serious disadvantage, we should do something about that.
RMS> There are various things that might be right to do, but simply
RMS> disregarding it in the case of Emacs cannot be right.

I am personally mostly worried about Thomas' points about getting scheme
and emacs lisp to coexist. I just cannot see any evolution of emacs fly
in the real world if it involves a clean cut away from the existing base
of emacs lisp libraries. How we would ever get all developers and all
users to back up such a move is beyond me ("all" used here in the sense
of "enough to form a critical mass").

(Incidently, there is still something called GNU Common Lisp, even if
not updated since 2005)


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Christian Lynbech       | christian #\@ defun #\. dk
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Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual.
                                        - petonic@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)