Re: history of argv (was: Re: How to do a massive unfill paragraph operation over several hundred files?)

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <mailman.1481.1538225108.1284.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
 Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> wrote:

> >
> > BTW I always thought, without thinking about
> > it, that "argv" is a convention in and from the
> > C programming language!
> >
> > But Lisp is older than C (1958 to 1972; Elisp
> > in particular tho a 1985 youngster) so perhaps it is the other way around?
> >
> 
> Though Lisp is older than C, it hasn't been static that entire time. It's
> not surprising to me that particular implementations would adapt to the
> ecosystems in which they are dropped (especially, as with Unix, that
> becomes the largest installed base for a couple decades), then pick those
> adaptations up and take them to other environments. I suspect that if
> Multics was still the main Emacs ecosystem, we'd see Multics-like names at
> the boundaries. In fact, they might be there and I just don't recognize
> them. <wink>

GNU Emacs also wasn't the first Emacs written in Lisp. Multics Emacs 
might have been the first, but there were other Emacs-like editors 
implemented in Lisp at MIT, Stanford, and CMU around the same time, I'm 
not sure which was actually first. GNU Emacs came much later than all of 
these, and it wasn't even the first one for Unix systems -- that would 
have been either Gosling Emacs or Z-Emacs.

Multics Emacs had the save-excursion macro, I think the others picked it 
up from there.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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