Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!rodney From: rodney@ipl.rpi.edu (Rodney Peck II) Newsgroups: comp.emacs Subject: Re: Why Lisp? (Was: Re: Remember how great editors used to be?) Message-ID: Date: 31 May 90 20:40:52 GMT References: <21720@megaron.cs.arizona.edu> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 27 gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes: >In article pierson@encore.com (Dan L. Pierson) writes: >>About Emacs extension languages. >>... >>But, just for the fun of it, think of an Emacs based on Perl instead >>of Lisp... >What about doing one in SNOBOL4? It has patterns (more general than >regular expressions) and the facilities necessary to read in and >execute new code at run-time. Even more fun, SNOBOL4 has goto's, and >it is possible for a running SNOBOL4 program to read and execute a >piece of SNOBOL4 code that has a goto to some label in the main >program. Wow. The evil editor on th Michigan Terminal System (MTS) which runs on IBM mainframes in nearly 8 different places in the world (RPI being one of them) is based on snobol. It might be nice except that being an ibm mainframe, everything is record orientated instead of character orientated so editing with keyboard mapping is not really feasable (at least they haven't bothered to try it out). So, you get to use this really awful editor on old rackety ibm 3270 consoles. Yuck. -- Rodney