From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!npoiv!npois!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:C70:editor-people
Newsgroups: fa.editor-p
Title: Heartless coders ; Interpreted Pascal
Article-I.D.: ucb.1833
Posted: Tue Aug 24 18:52:41 1982
Received: Tue Oct 12 03:37:32 1982

>From willson.uci@UDel-Relay Tue Aug 24 01:45:07 1982
I consider a person who thinks that a person who deletes his buffer with C-W
and doesn't know to try C-Y or Undo despite all the documentation and the
prominent place they give those commands is hopeless to be a heartless
technocrat.  People without sympathy for their fellow men will always make
it easy for them to suffer.  Just EXACTLY which commands does an EMACS user
have to understand and at what point in his development must he understand
them so as not to be considered hopeless?

On another subject: regarding the interest in having a Pascal-like language
be the extensible language for a text editor: here at UCI we are developing
an Ada interpreter that lives in a Lisp-like environment.  It is by no means
ready for release to the public, though we plan to try it out on a class of
undergraduates this fall.  The user interface of the interpreter is an
editor that allows keystrokes to be bound to Ada procedures ala Emacs.  The
point I want to make is that unless you are serious about writing an
interpreter for a strongly-typed, statically scoped language like Pascal/Ada
(as opposed to Lisp, or even a Lisp with static scoping), then you should be
prepared to do a lot of work.  A Lisp dialect with dynamic scoping is your
best bet: people are used to dialects of Lisp, and dynamic scoping makes
sense for interpretation.  A big problem we have trying to coerce Ada into
being interpretable is that we can't make any changes in the semantics of
the language.  People get very upset if we violate a single rule.  I suspect
that users of your system, if it had Pascal as the extensible language,
would consistently come around knocking on your door asking for more and
more features of Pascal to work, until you have implemented an entire Pascal
environment.  Unless this is your goal, as opposed to merely writing a text
editor, you should give serious thought to abandoning your plan to use
Pascal as the extensible language for your editor.

I realize the preceding paragraph is a bit vague and sketchy.  It's hard to
summarize such a big subject in one paragraph.

			Steve Willson
			UC Irvine