Re: Common vs Emacs Lisp (was: Re: return)

[Fren Zeee]

Chad,

As soon as I finished composing my earlier reply, the idea of backward
compatibility and legacy code immediately struck me and the bane of a
company like microsoft from dos to win3.x to win95 to NT4 .... which
had an "unlimited" supply of money and workforce.

I agree with all of what you say. Only that I want you to fill in some
sharp example details in the pithy and poetic statement you have made.

It would help us in our times of frustration of the pros and cons. :)))

Cheers,
Franz Xe

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Chad Brown <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Dec 3, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Fren Zeee wrote:
>>
>> Why not just throw the whole elisp and use CL to run emacs with
>> lexical scoping ?
>>
>> What particular advantages do there accrue from the dyn scoped elisp
>> and by incrementally making fixes to this dinosaur ?
>
> Conservatively, I'll say at least 10,000 programmer-hours of existing, heavily
> used (by emacs standards) elisp libraries, systems, programs, etc.
>
> There are/have been projects that recreate emacs in Scheme, Common
> Lisp, and Tcl (that I know of).  None of them have done very well when
> forced head-to-head with Emacs (Tcl doing the best, due to environment).
>
> I suspect that I'd get widespread agreement from emacs developers to
> a statement like the following:
>
>        Common Lisp contains some good stuff that I'd like to see in Emacs
>        and a large amount of stuff that I'd never want to see in Emacs, even
>        if it meant giving up the former.
>
> ..and that assumes that someone else magically does the work.
>
> For CL in particular, it looks like Climacs could use some help.
>
> *Chad