Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!hsdndev!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: The powerlessness of Lisp Message-ID: <20757:Mar2521:23:0191@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Date: 25 Mar 91 21:23:01 GMT References: <1991Mar21.123512.22876@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> <16060:Mar2515:41:5691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Distribution: na Organization: IR Lines: 23 In article Benjamin Chase writes: > Or did you mean just that file of machine code that gets run when you > start gnu emacs? No, even that small part of GNU Emacs wasn't derived > solely from C. Yes, that is the GNU Emacs program, and I never said anything about what it was ``derived from.'' It is written in C, and any C programmer who wants to make use of dynamic typing can get away with a similarly tiny amount of helper code. No amount of crap about ``sole derivations'' or ``it's written in Lisp, really!'' will change this fact. What are you trying to do? Make a religious point, or get work done? I'm sure RMS didn't care about how impossible polymorphic lists are in C when he was working on Emacs. > Get some facts, Dan. Sheesh. At least I've had the sheer joy of compiling Emacs on a couple of unsupported systems, one of which can't handle undumping. I'm not an Emacs expert, but you can assume that I know what language a program is written in when I've worked with the code of that program. ---Dan