Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!iwarp.intel.com!news
From: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Why Lisp? (Was:  Re: Remember how great editors used to be?)
Message-ID: <1990Jun7.183108.16620@iwarp.intel.com>
Date: 7 Jun 90 18:31:08 GMT
References: <1990May30.052145.15392@agate.berkeley.edu> <13920007@hpisod2.HP.COM>
Sender: news@iwarp.intel.com
Reply-To: merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz)
Organization: Stonehenge; netaccess via Intel, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Lines: 37
In-Reply-To: jem@hpisod2.HP.COM (Jim McCauley)

In article <13920007@hpisod2.HP.COM>, jem@hpisod2 (Jim McCauley) writes:
| At 11:35 am  May 30, 1990, pierson@encore.com (Dan L. Pierson) wrote:
| 
| > But, just for the fun of it, think of an Emacs based on Perl instead
| > of Lisp...
| 
| This is only a moderately terrible idea.  If it led to the practice of
| Un*x users consistently using an editor as their shell, it couldn't be
| entirely bad.  The members of my documentation team are nearly all ksh
| users, perdominantly due to the interactive command-line editing feature.

As much of a Perl fanatic as I present myself as, I kinda like having
a lisp-like language be the underpinnings of my shell, er, Emacs.

I invoke an emacstool once per day on each machine in this net that
I'm going to be using.  (I hardly ever invoke just a shelltool.)  I
live inside Emacs, firing off (sometimes multiple) shell windows from
the Emacs.  For example, right now, I'm typing this message on an
Emacs 'gnews' window running on iwarpsa (a sparc) that I've logged
into from iwarpj0 (the diskless Sun3 on my desk), and I'm reading and
replying to mail in another emacstool on iwarpj (a sun3 that handles
my mail).  When I need to do a command, I invoke 'background-shell' in
the appropriate emacs window.

From home, I log in with my Hayes V.32 modem (19.2Kbaud), and
immediately invoke an Emacs... this gives me windows at home.  And,
it's the same interface as what I have at work.  So all my tools and
keystrokes are the same.

Why have a shell prompt?

Just another Emacs hacker (and Perl hacker),
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
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