Guile vs ELisp

Guile vs ELisp

[Dani Moncayo]

Hi there,

I'm a beginner in Elisp, and have a question (just for curiosity):

Go to the Emacs Lips Manual (edition 3.0 / Emacs 24.0.50), section
"1.2 Lisp History". The last paragraph reads like this:

>    Emacs Lisp is not at all influenced by Scheme; but the GNU project
> has an implementation of Scheme, called Guile.  We use Guile in all new
> GNU software that calls for extensibility.

...so my question is: If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
today, would Guile be better than ELips as extensibility language?

Thanks in advance. Dani.

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Jason Earl]

On Wed, Nov 03 2010, Dani Moncayo wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm a beginner in Elisp, and have a question (just for curiosity):
>
> Go to the Emacs Lips Manual (edition 3.0 / Emacs 24.0.50), section
> "1.2 Lisp History". The last paragraph reads like this:
>
>>    Emacs Lisp is not at all influenced by Scheme; but the GNU project
>> has an implementation of Scheme, called Guile.  We use Guile in all new
>> GNU software that calls for extensibility.
>
> ...so my question is: If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
> today, would Guile be better than ELips as extensibility language?
>
> Thanks in advance. Dani.

There has been at least one attempt at a Guile-based Emacs (google Guile
Emacs), and fairly recently Andy Wingo posted this message to
emacs-devel.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00665.html

I think that it is at least somewhat likely that a near-future Emacs
might run Guile.[1]

Jason

Footnotes: 
[1] By near-future, I mean in the next 50 or so years,
    perhaps much sooner.

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Tim X]

Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm a beginner in Elisp, and have a question (just for curiosity):
>
> Go to the Emacs Lips Manual (edition 3.0 / Emacs 24.0.50), section
> "1.2 Lisp History". The last paragraph reads like this:
>
>>    Emacs Lisp is not at all influenced by Scheme; but the GNU project
>> has an implementation of Scheme, called Guile.  We use Guile in all new
>> GNU software that calls for extensibility.
>
> ...so my question is: If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
> today, would Guile be better than ELips as extensibility language?
>

In short, yes, guile would probably be a better extension language than
elisp, which has some real limitations. There has been a lot of
discussion about this over the years. In general, most acccept that
guile would be better, but the issue is all the legacy elisp code that
would be lost and the amount of work that would need to be done to get
the same level of functionality we already have. 

While we may see an emacs like editor with guile as the extension
language at some point in the future, though I doubt it, I suspect it
will be a totally new beastie. Imagine an emacs that is multi-threaded,
has an extension language with namespaces, closures, etc and can start
without any of the old 'baggage' and learns from the wealth of
experience gained over the past 40 years. Could be a truely wonderful
thing. At the same time, consider all the effort and work that has gone
into the fine editor we now have and the amount of work it would take to
get the same functionality - a huge task. Then combine that with the
wealth of alternatives and the fact I think most people are now use to
using many different programs. There is an argument that would suggest
we are better off with distinct programs that all do one thing, but do
it really well rather than one large program that tries to do
everything. If you use emacs just as an editor, what level of power do
you really need in an extension language. While elisp may have some real
limitaitons, most of these don't greatly impact on things you want to do
with it that are diretly relevant to an editor. Most of the limitations
apear to become an issue when you start writing extensions to do things
other than those directly relating to editing of text i.e. web browser,
mail readers, chat /IM clients, etc. 

Tim



-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Richard Riley]

Jason Earl <jearl@notengoamigos.org> writes:

> On Wed, Nov 03 2010, Dani Moncayo wrote:
>
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I'm a beginner in Elisp, and have a question (just for curiosity):
>>
>> Go to the Emacs Lips Manual (edition 3.0 / Emacs 24.0.50), section
>> "1.2 Lisp History". The last paragraph reads like this:
>>
>>>    Emacs Lisp is not at all influenced by Scheme; but the GNU project
>>> has an implementation of Scheme, called Guile.  We use Guile in all new
>>> GNU software that calls for extensibility.
>>
>> ...so my question is: If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
>> today, would Guile be better than ELips as extensibility language?
>>
>> Thanks in advance. Dani.
>
> There has been at least one attempt at a Guile-based Emacs (google Guile
> Emacs), and fairly recently Andy Wingo posted this message to
> emacs-devel.
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00665.html
>
> I think that it is at least somewhat likely that a near-future Emacs
> might run Guile.[1]
>
> Jason
>
> Footnotes: 
> [1] By near-future, I mean in the next 50 or so years,
>     perhaps much sooner.
>

So Guile based with it being able to use existing eLisp? Sounds too good
to be true..

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com>
() Thu, 4 Nov 2010 00:11:28 +0100

   If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
   today, would Guile be better than ELips as
   extensibility language?

That is a good question!

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Tassilo Horn]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org> writes:

> () Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com>
> () Thu, 4 Nov 2010 00:11:28 +0100
>
>    If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
>    today, would Guile be better than ELips as
>    extensibility language?
>
> That is a good question!

There was some talk on emacs-devel about implementing elisp in Guile, so
that elisp runs in the Guile VM and uses its garbage collection, its FFI
and all other nice things.

  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00665.html

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Stefan Husmann]

Am 04.11.2010 00:11, schrieb Dani Moncayo:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm a beginner in Elisp, and have a question (just for curiosity):
> 
> Go to the Emacs Lips Manual (edition 3.0 / Emacs 24.0.50), section
> "1.2 Lisp History". The last paragraph reads like this:
> 
>>    Emacs Lisp is not at all influenced by Scheme; but the GNU project
>> has an implementation of Scheme, called Guile.  We use Guile in all new
>> GNU software that calls for extensibility.
> 
> ...so my question is: If GNU Emacs was to be started from scratch
> today, would Guile be better than ELips as extensibility language?
> 
> Thanks in advance. Dani.
> 
> 
I do not know a project that actually uses guile. Even GNU 
projects do not do so. For example The Gimp uses Script-FU, a language 
derived from Tiny-Scheme. The window manager sawfish uses rep, another 
schemish language.

Regards Stefan

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Jose A. Ortega Ruiz]

On Thu, Nov 04 2010, Stefan Husmann wrote:

[...]

> I do not know a project that actually uses guile. Even GNU 
> projects do not do so. For example The Gimp uses Script-FU, a language 
> derived from Tiny-Scheme. The window manager sawfish uses rep, another 
> schemish language.

GNUCash, LilyPond, Snd, TeXMacs, MDK and mailtools come to mind.

jao
-- 
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could
do only a little. -Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Elena]

On Nov 4, 9:30 am, Elena <egarr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Don't hold your breath, though.
>
> A Scheme-based editor already exists: it's Edwin (MIT Scheme).  I
> remember someone already implemented Emacs Lisp on top of Edwin for a
> student project, but he didn't post his work on the Internet.

Found the paper: http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA276721

Does anybody knows whether sources have been released?  Since it is a
quite old project, my guess is it will be difficult to find.

Re: Guile vs ELisp

[Dani Moncayo]

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So it seems that Scheme is not used in "all new GNU Software that calls for
extensibility"...

Thank you for replying.

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