Subject: Re: Multiple LISP's? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2001 11:39:25 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3210493163463703@naggum.net> * James A Crippen > Compounded with that is that RMS will probably never allow GNU Emacs to > be rewritten to use a different Lisp * Christopher Stacy > Huh? Anybody is "free" to do so! However, RMS might or might not want > to help with such a port/rewrite: you'd have to ask him. Well... the freedom to fork is illusory at best. The animosity from RMS over the fork between Classic Emacs and Lucid Emacs (later XEmacs) is legendary. When I tried to help people get access to the new features of Emacs 20 but get rid of the still seriously braindamaged MULE crap, I carefully created a backward-compatible "Multi-Byte Survival Kit", which was picked up by RedHat and had many thousands of users. RMS' response to this was to introduce an incompatibility in the byte-compiled file format (it now required MULE crap to load, which really is unnecesasry) the very next release in order to keep people away from it. > I'd be more interested in a CL version. I think it would have been the greatest thing for the spread of Common Lisp to produce the next generation Emacs based in a real Lisp with a much better design of the whole application and user-visible language. Emacs Lisp is hopelessly ancient, and has even gone the way of Scheme with non-general and type-specific functions. > One issue is: what compiler/interpreter and development tools would be > distributed with the editor so that people could load extension > libraries, and write their own extensions. Since this is one of those thing that really would move the Common Lisp community forward, the ideal situation would be for the vendors to gang up with a funded, but voluntary team and provide the necessary support to get this going as a demonstration project for the power of Common Lisp. However, I think it might be as much as a 100-man-year job, the funding for which might have to come from Osama bin Laden's frozen funds because there simply is not enough resources to do this for free elsewhere now. /// -- Why did that stupid George W. Bush turn to Christian fundamentalism to fight Islamic fundamentalism? Why use terms like "crusade", which only invokes fear of a repetition of that disgraceful period of Christianity with its _sustained_ terrorist attacks on Islam? He is _such_ an idiot.