Subject: Re: Why is Scheme not a Lisp? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 23:40:19 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3225051630823951@naggum.net> * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | I think one difference in retrospect is that Common Lisp is very, um, | non-lightweight. Even the 1984 spec is *very* rich. While that richness | is one of the great strengths of Common Lisp, and one of the things that | accounts for its popularity, it is also a detriment to using it as an | extension language for something like Emacs. I disagree. Emacs Lisp would have been a lot simpler if it were based on Common Lisp. A lot. Object-orientation Common Lisp style would have made Emacs a lot more customizable and much friendlier to Emacs hackers (old sense). | People already complain about Emacs being too huge; adding in the entire | library of Common Lisp would be, um, painful. Not so. Trust me on this, I spent a year or so working on a design for CLEMACS, until it became clear to me that I would have to maintain _continued_ source-level compatibility with Emacs Lisp, and that caused me to rethink the whole idea and its desirability, because I had worked too long on Emacs Lisp to regard this as a simple, solvable problem. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.