🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9012011844.AA10842@mole.ai.mit.edu> rms@AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) writes:
>I think that Emacs Lisp as it is does its job; I don't think that
>switching to Scheme would be a great improvement.  It would break
>large amounts of code.  Even if it were a large improvement, we could
>not spare the effort to write the interpreter or convert the code.


An almost complete implementation of Emacs comes with MIT Scheme V7. 
It's called edwin.  The syntax for the scheme files has been made to be
very close to Elisp, and large parts of the system are borrowed from GNU
Emacs (with due accreditation and COPYLEFT).  But it's quite a bit
slower than GNU, and restricted to machines that Scheme runs on, which
is a small subset of GNU Emacs. 

I too think that Emacs Lisp as it is does its job.  I regret some of the
MacLisp design decisions tha RMS made in Elisp, such purely dynamic
scoping, but the point was not to write a modern lisp.  The real crux
is that it is simply not worth writing a Lisp compiler for GNU emacs.
Look at the size of the MIT Scheme compiler is you want an idea of
what that involves...

Mike.


-- 
Mike Clarkson					mike@ists.ists.ca
Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science	uunet!attcan!ists!mike
York University, North York, Ontario,		FORTRAN - just say no. 
CANADA M3J 1P3					+1 (416) 736-5611