Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!nike!ucbcad!ucbvax!ernie.Berkeley.EDU!phr
From: phr@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Rubin)
Newsgroups: net.micro.atari16
Subject: Re: GNU_EMACS and uEMACS
Message-ID: <15737@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Sat, 20-Sep-86 21:59:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.15737
Posted: Sat Sep 20 21:59:45 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Sep-86 18:17:04 EDT
References: <8609201259.AA04886@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: phr@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Paul Rubin)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 23

A few people have mentioned Mock Lisp in GNU Emacs.  I'd like to correct
this: Mock Lisp simple Lisp-like language used in Gosling Emacs which is now
sold by Unipress Corp.  It is called "Mock" Lisp because among other
things it doesn't have a CONS function.  GNU Emacs Lisp is a real Lisp
(including CONS) which some pretty substantial programs have been
written in.  Most of GNU Emacs's editing commands are written in
Lisp.

In my opinion, trying to merge Xlisp with MicroEmacs would result in a
horrible kludge and trying to make it able to run GNU Emacs Lisp functions
would, if it is feasible at all, give you a program as big as GNU Emacs.
It would be simpler to just port GNU Emacs to the ST.  This is not a
completely crazy thing to contemplate doing on a 1 megabyte machine and
is a completely reasonable idea with 2 or 4 megabytes.  (The program text
segment of GNU Emacs is about 600k on a VAX, which includes a lot of sharable
Lisp code as well as a lot of code for things like Unix asynchronous process
control which would have to be flushed on an ST).

Someone (Bradley Mitchell?) has made an extensible MicroEmacs by combining
it with a FORTH system.  That seems like a more sensible approach than
writing a Lisp system if the goal is to keep the program small; however,
writing very complicated macros is probably more difficult.  I've never
used FORTH so I don't know for sure.