Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!ima!think!rlk
From: rlk@think.com (Robert Krawitz)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: GNU Emacs Lisp
Message-ID: <34906@think.UUCP>
Date: 29 Dec 88 16:32:33 GMT
References: <2198@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Sender: news@think.UUCP
Reply-To: rlk@think.com (Robert Krawitz)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corp., Cambridge MA
Lines: 40
In-reply-to: Dave Lawrence

In article <2198@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>, Dave Lawrence writes:
]Could someone please summarize to me the basic differences between Common
]Lisp and Emacs Lisp (and perhaps some side-bars on Liszt).  Is Emacs mostly
]upwardly compatible with common?  I did notice that I couldn't do `cadr'
]as one primitive; I had to split it into `car (cdr'.  

Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp are completely different creatures.  Emacs
lisp has lots of editing features (it is, after all, intended for
extending an editor), but it's missing a pile of CL features (floating
point numbers, most reader macros, most extended data types).  There
is a CL quasi-compatibility package that provides structs and a lot of
control structure (and some other features) that makes emacs lisp a
lot easier to use.  The nastiest incompatibility, in my opinion, is
that CL is generally case insensitive while EL is case sensitive.
This makes it very difficult for emacs lisp to read common lisp code,
which is useful on occasion.

]Where is a good place to get comprehensive info on the primitives of Emacs
]Lisp?   There wasn't anything like what I wanted in the Info structure, 
]although I must admit that I found many interesting things while looking for
]it.  C-h f and C-h v are good for finding the names of functions and
]variables that I've seen, but there must be a better way than pushing through
]tons of code to figure it all out.

There is an emacs lisp programmers' manual; contact Dan LaLiberte
(liberte@a.cs.uiuc.edu) for details.  M-x apropos is a good tool; it
takes a string as an argument and returns a buffer containing all
symbols containing the string and one line of documentation for each.

]By the way, I've long wondered what Emacs stands for

Editing MACroS.  What became ITS emacs was originally various
collections of macros for TECO; RMS collected them and reworked the
result into the first emacs.  GNU Emacs is RMS's second or third emacs
(I don't know how much he had to do with zwei, the Lisp Machine
editor).
-- 
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