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From: earl@mips.UUCP (Earl Killian)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Small is beautiful
Message-ID: <768@gumby.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-Oct-87 01:52:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: gumby.768
Posted: Mon Oct 12 01:52:25 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 13-Oct-87 04:37:59 EDT
References: <121@quick.COM> <115@suprt.UUCP>
Lines: 18

In article <115@suprt.UUCP>, mdg@suprt.UUCP (Marc de Groot) writes:
> Didn't Richard Stallman write the original EMACS as a TECO macro? That's
> what I thought I heard.

Yes, this is true.  However, it was not written in ordinary TECO, but
rather ITS TECO, which is a high-powered programming language in its
own right, with far more control structure and data primitives than C
or Pascal (the control structures are mostly borrowed from Lisp).  A
better debugging environment too.  While powerful, ITS TECO has an
obscurity quotient higher than just about any programming language
ever invented.  (About as close as a hacker can get to mainlining.)

If you think small is beautiful, then you'd probably love the original
EMACS; the TECO code was probably 8x smaller than the corresponding
pdp10 machine code would be.  The number of lines of source is
probably 4x smaller than the corresponding C code would be.  But for
some very strange reason, none of the subsequent EMACS implementations
has ever used ITS TECO as an implementation language :-).