Re: Differences between Elisp and Lisp

[Nicolas Neuss <Nicolas.Neuss@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de>]

Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> writes:

> [important article]

Thanks for this contribution.  I hope RMS listens, too.  So much time has
been lost already...

Only some comments to this paragraph:

> One option that would allow both paradigms might be to do like AutoCad
> did and separate the notion of 'library' and 'datastructures' from the
> issue of 'language'.  In that way, you might be able to design a system
> where you could elect to program in any of several languages using the
> same stack, data, error handling as glue between them.  In that world,
> both Scheme and CL (or a CL subset) could survive, as well as perhaps
> other languages, if someone were interested to provide such.  I don't
> really so much want to keep people from programming in Scheme [if you
> can address that unwind-protect issue, which I think is a real technical
> concern] as to assure that people who are used to programming in a certain
> Lisp style already aren't told they no longer can.  If there's a way to
> frame this as "increasing one's options" instead of "one political party
> triumphing over another", that would be superior in my view.

I want to add that such a multiple language environment should better be
based on CL than on Scheme.  At least, it is possible to imbed languages
like Scheme and Prolog [1] in CL (in contrast to what Guile can currently
do).

Maybe the best possibility would be to replace elisp with GCL (which is
C-based and should be similarly portable as gcc and emacs).

Nicolas.

[1] See Norvig's PAIP.