Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rpi!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!nelson From: nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs Subject: Re: MS-DOS Message-ID: Date: 27 Apr 89 03:46:44 GMT References: <8904262225.AA07039@NCoast.ORG> Sender: news@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Reply-To: nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu Distribution: gnu Organization: Clarkson University, Postdam NY Lines: 35 In-reply-to: allbery@ncoast.org's message of 26 Apr 89 22:25:05 GMT In article <8904262225.AA07039@NCoast.ORG> allbery@ncoast.org (Brandon S. Allbery) writes: Freemacs is copylefted. It was written and is maintained by Russ Nelson ; the most recent version is always available for FTP from clutx.clarkson.edu. The most recent version is 1.4d. Just a few corrections -- the canonical version is on grape.ecs.clarkson.edu in /e/freemacs, and the current version is 1.5d. Also, the next version is going to use the General Public License subroutine (thanks, rms!) Early versions of Freemacs were quite different from Gnu Emacs; however, with version 1.4a, Russ started bringing it in line with Gnu; it's pretty close right now, although I have altered my bindings a bit to make it even closer. Freemacs should be a proper subset of GNU Emacs. Anything else is a bug. Please report them directly to me. You needn't report the bug whereby Freemacs won't edit files larger than 64K -- I am *well* aware of that one, and have plans to fix it. Freemacs doesn't use elisp (neither does Epsilon, for that matter). It uses a language called MINT ("MINT is not TRAC", whatever that means; I daresay someone out there *does* know...) which is basically a text-processing language. The syntax bears little resemblance to Lisp. No, but the semantics are closer to Lisp than you might think. I have ported small pieces of high-level elisp to MINT by changing the syntactic sugar. Low- level elisp is harder because MINT is a string processor, not a list processor. TRAC was devised by Calvin N. Mooers (who, incidentally, lives in Cambridge, Mass) back in 1964 with the help of one L. Peter Deutsch, of recent note as the author of Ghostscript, a freed program. I must add, on fear of litigation, that TRAC is a trademark and service mark of Rockford Research (aka C.N.M.), and that MINT is incompatible with, but similar to and based on TRAC. -- --russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu]) S&Ls get bailouts and that's okay, but poor people get welfare and that's not.