Re: Lookarounds and recursion in Emacs regexes

[Stefan Monnier via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

> [re: Elisp, I heard GIMP once used Lisp as its
>  configuration/extension language, only at some point switched
>  to Python for that. That's not gonna happen to Emacs, is it?
>  *runs away*]

There's a common confusion that ELisp is some kind of extension language
for Emacs.  That's not quite true.  ELisp is an *implementation*
language of Emacs (along with C for the other half).

It doesn't prevent adding other extension languages, nor even does it
necessarily prevent changing the implementation language to another one
in theory.

But in practice it has discouraged most attempts to provide
another language (except arguably for the "statically scoped dialect of
ELisp", because its interoperability with the original ELisp was
sufficiently smooth).


        Stefan