Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!mailrus!bbn!jr@bbn.com
From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Origin of term "Emacs"
Keywords: Etymology, Emacs
Message-ID: <44052@bbn.COM>
Date: 9 Aug 89 18:18:03 GMT
References: <2481@orion.cf.uci.edu> <57187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge MA
Lines: 32
In-reply-to: lum@armadillo.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lum Johnson)

In article <57187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, lum@armadillo (Lum Johnson) writes:
>TECO, like LISP, represents code and data identically, so programs
>written in these languages may easily act upon, amoung other things,
>programs written in these languages, such as themselves.  In these
>languages it is reasonably common to find programs which may rewrite
>or elaborate parts of themselves, or at least are able to do so.
>Of the two, LISP is easily the more readable.  In fact, TECO (along
>with APL) has been described as a write-only language.

Bill Mann once described APL as "TECO on matrices".  I suppose this
makes Lisp "TECO on lists".

>Does anyone have a TECO emulator for GNU Elisp yet?

There is a TECO in C now; I think it was distributed in one of the
comp.sources.* newsgroups.  The Elisp version can't be too far off :-)

To complete the history, one should mention TV TECO, which was an
early attempt to make use of all those 24 lines on the tube (remember,
much of the world was still using teletypes in 1971).  It was as
though you were always typing raw TECO at the minibuff line, then at
the completion of a command it would show you 22 lines surrounding
point.  Point was shown with the two characters /\ .  A little dumb,
but it worked on a VT05.  I think there were 3 or 4 of these
half-way-from-TECO-to-EMACS attempts.

WYSIWYG with self-insertion and automatic redisplay came later with
EMACS.  I'm not saying it was the first to do this, but in the TECO
descendents I think it was.
--
/jr, nee John Robinson     Life did not take over the globe by combat,
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr          but by networking -- Lynn Margulis