[Info-vax] Lisp alternatives for Emacs [was Re: Python for x86?]

[Andreas Eder]

On Fr 21 Apr 2023 at 16:31, Rich Alderson <news at alderson.users.panix.com> wrote:

> =?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>
>> On 4/21/2023 1:09 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>
>>> On 2023-04-21, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>>>> On 4/21/2023 10:51 AM, Chris Townley wrote:
>
>>>>> Is Lisp still used these days?
>
>>> In Emacs. Unfortunately. :-(
>
>>> What a bloody horrible monstrosity of a language. :-(
>
> ITYM "what a wonderfully polymorphic language capable of expressing multiple
> programming paradigms at once". ;-)

+1

>
>>> I wish they had used something else for Emacs. Anything else.
>
>> I am sure a lot of people agree.
>
>> But what were the alternatives when Emacs Lisp was created?
>
>> Emacs Basic?
>
> EMACS began life as a library of macros for the MIT AI Lab's dialect of TECO
> for the PDP-10.  (TECO itself was written in MIDAS, a powerful macro assembler
> that originated on the PDP-6.)  Initially, a real time editing feature was
> added, and several hackers created small libraries of their own favorite
> macros, then a hacker named Richard Stallman gathered up all those libraries,
> eliminated duplicates and rationalized the implementation, and released the
> result to the community.
>
> EMACS was ported from the ITS operating system on their PDP-10s to TENEX
> (ancestral to TOPS-20) by porting TECO there.
>
> EMACS was also ported to Multics on the Honeywell 6180 processor at the MIT
> Laboratory for Computer Science, but not by porting TECO.  Instead, the MACLISP
> dialect of LISP, another creation of the AI Lab, had already been ported to
> Multics, so that was used as the base language for the EMACS port.
>
> Meanwhile, an editor with the capabilities of EMACS was desired for the Lisp
> machines being created by the AI Lab, so taking their cue from the Multics port
> two Lisp based editors, EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE
> Initially"), were created.

Wasn't there also DREI (DREI was EINE Initially)?

> There might have been alternatives, but why fuck with a good thing?

+1

'Andreas