Re: beginner questions

[JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com>]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> JohnF <john@please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes:
> 
>>> You should also set auto-mode-alist
>>>   (setq auto-mode-alist '(("." . fundamental-mode)))
>> Yup, that solved the problem.
>> Now I'll have to find a quick-and-dirty elisp tutorial

> (info "(elisp) Comment Tips")
Thanks, Pascal. I'd totally forgotten about info,
and  info elisp  from the shell also works great.

> An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/
I'm getting "page not found" for that one (and a couple
of variations I tried). Backing up a notch,
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ has a general
"Lisp Language" link to wikipedia (which also has an emacs lisp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs_lisp page that doesn't quite
seem quick-and-dirty-tutorial-like).

> or
>   M-: (info "(eintr)Top") RET
>   (for non-programmers)
That seems good, too. A little different than the
shell info elisp, but I haven't looked through
either one carefully yet.

> Emacs Lisp Manual
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/elisp.html
Yeah, a little too wordy for my quick-and-dirty definition
which, to me anyway, starts with a "hello, world" example.
That is, it assumes the reader has enough overall programming
experience so that if he's shown a small example, he'll
intuitively see a lot of the semantics behind the syntax.
And he'll intuit a good deal of syntax, too.
   For example, just your  M-: (info "(eintr)Top") RET
above was very informative. I wasn't aware of  M-: ,
but as soon as it said Eval:, and I took another look at
your (expression), I got the point.
   Now, I obviously don't get everything, or even all that much,
so a good quick-and-dirty tutorial might well add some discussion
after that example. But at least I'll start with a good sense
of what we're talking about and where we're going. And if
it's not what I'm currently interested in, I can immediately
move on to another example and discussion.
   But most of these tutorials start out with thousands of
words about elementary syntactic stuff that's indeed crucial,
but can often be kind of telegraphed with a few well-chosen
examples. You sure won't rigorously learn all the syntax
immediately, but you'll immediately get a pretty good idea
of how to do simple things. And the interpreter/compiler
(or assembler:) will gleefully let you know when you've
messed up syntactically.

> or
>   M-: (info "(elisp)Top") RET
Right, this one looks exactly like the shell info elisp.
Thanks again,
-- 
John Forkosh  ( mailto:  j@f.com  where j=john and f=forkosh )