Re: Extension Languages

drw@kronecker.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Wed, 16 Dec 1992 22:47:28 GMT

          From comp.compilers
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Re: Extension Languages daveg@thymus.synaptics.com (Dave Gillespie) (1992-12-15)
Re: Extension Languages drw@kronecker.mit.edu (1992-12-16)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: drw@kronecker.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
Organization: MIT Dept. of Tetrapilotomy, Cambridge, MA, USA
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 22:47:28 GMT
Keywords: design, Lisp
References: 92-12-056 92-12-064

Dave Gillespie <daveg@thymus.synaptics.com> writes:
      I think Emacs uses Lisp as its base language because Lisp is so well
      adapted to running interpretively and in a constantly changing
      environment.


Historically, the development of Emacs' extension language is more like
this:


The first Emacs was written as a set of extensions to the MIT AI Lab's
Teco, so all extensions were written in Teco.


When it came time to port it to Multics and Tops-20, Emacs was rewritten
using Lisp as the base language, because reimplementing Teco would be too
gross, and Lisp was the only other high-level language at the AI Lab.


No doubt this is over-simplified, but I suspect that historical accident
and the prejudices of AI people had a lot to do with it.


Dale
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