Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!itsgw!imagine!Dave
From: Dave Lawrence
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: GNU Elisp -- Summary
Message-ID: <2211@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: 30 Dec 88 04:54:46 GMT
Sender: news@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU
Reply-To: tale@pawl.rpi.edu
Organization: The Octagon Room
Lines: 74

Thanks all; that was by far the best response I've had to a single
question.  Here is basically what I learned:
 
Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp are about as related as man and monkeys.
Darwin says that there is a common ancestor but things went their own
ways from there.  The common ancestor was MIT MACLisp.
 
Emacs Lisp is dynamically scoped; Common Lisp is lexically scoped.
This creates some rather large problems on a fundamental level as far
as compatibility is concerned.
 
Elisp doesn't have floating-point arithmetic.  Some notable absences
from Elisp (for my needs) are defstruct and setf.
 
Cesar Quiroz wrote a Common Lisp library that is included in the
standard distribution; an info file exists in $EMACS/etc/cl.texinfo.
The library is in $EMACS/lisp/cl.el(c).  It is not a complete library;
many things are still lacking and there are a few syntax differences.
Overall though the feel of Common Lisp is there and with it I do
have access to defstruct and a functional setf.
 
Documentation can be had a number of ways.  An ex-Renssealer TA
pointed me to a secretary in the computer-science department at RPI.
(Random Housers' say hi Chip and yes, MTS just got put on the 3090
at the beginning of the week.)  Doug Tiarks <doug@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
has informed me that:

]A pre-release version of the Emacs lisp manual can be gotten via
]anonymous ftp from a.cs.uiuc.edu:gnuemacs.  It is not complete yet,
]but is far enough to be quite useful. It covers most of the available
]primitives. It is 300-400 pages and requires a TeX dvi filter for
]printing.  I have heard that is is not usable under emacs info due to
]some extentions, but I have not tried it.

One last way to get all of the on-line documentation of functions and
primitives is to push the list returned by apropos through the 
documentation function.  `(mapcar 'documentation (apropos ""))' was 
suggested by Bill Janssen at MCC Software.  Note that it will keep
Emacs busy for a couple of moments.

I was going to use Elisp to write an adventure that would take
advantage of a lot of editing features of GNU Emacs; right now it is a
big debate because my basic structure requires a lot of property
manipulation.  It still is probably going to happen in Elisp, but now
I know what to be prepared for.  My alternatives are Kyoto Common or
Franz and I know nothing about the latter, just that we have it.  No
one commented on it.  
 
And the Emacs name?  Keith Gabryelski <elgar!ag@ucsd.edu>:

]Emacs was an ice-cream parlor around MIT where RMS (the original
]writer of ITS EMACS) hung out.  EMACS use to be a set of macros in
]ITS TECO.  It seems EMACS could also stand for Editor MACroS.
]The former I heard from a friend of RMS (LIZZY@AI).  The latter from
]the ITS EMACS Manual.

(Now I wonder what that ITS stands for ... seems as though we have an
ITS (Information Technology Services) here and I bet it's not the one
meant.)

From _Lisp_, written by Patrick Winston with Berthold Horn at MIT, I
discovered Stallman also wrote Gmacs sometime around 1979.  On a
reference page that mentions a lot of Lisp variants (I hadn't realized
that there were so many; I thought there were around 6 or 7) Elisp is
curiously absent, as is GNU in general.  Considering how deeply
involved GNU is with Lisp, I can only attribute this to the fact that
the book is four years old.

Thank you all for the information you provided.  It has been very
helpful and once again it just helped me learn even more neat stuff.
 
Dave
--
      tale@rpitsmts.bitnet, tale%mts@rpitsgw.rpi.edu, tale@pawl.rpi.edu