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From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Tradeoffs
Message-ID: <2293@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 8 Jun 90 12:01:25 GMT
References: <640@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> <2662CE6C.3E68@tct.uucp> <26798@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <266576A7.6D17@tct.uucp> <9494@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1990Jun3.041822.13548@utzoo.uucp> <27416@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <.5X3-ZB@xds13.ferranti.com> <671@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 20

In article <671@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall) writes:

| The code for emacs (including pre loaded lisp) is around 600K. This
| doesn't seem so bad if you stop thinking of it as a text editor, and
| start thinking of it as a language interpreter which runs an editor
| among other things.

  This is a very non-unix-like approach. I have always though of UNIX
as being a system in which little programs did one thing well and
worked cooperatively. GNUemacs is one huge program which tryies to do
everything and be everything. It might have made sense as an operating
system.

  This is not a criticism of the approach, just a comment on its
relationship to times when everything went in one place. It's like the
kernel bloat, a victim of "creeping featurism."

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
            "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me