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From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: EMACS on a Commodore?
Message-ID: <9132@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 22 Dec 89 06:15:29 GMT
References: <1791@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM>
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 48

in article <1791@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM>, anderson@ncrcce.StPaul.NCR.COM (Joel Peter Anderson) says:
> Summary: Wait a minute! Why not?
> Keywords:

> [...] while not an editor with Macros (EMACs = Editor with MACros) [...]

Actually, the emacs name come from Editor MACros, or some such.  The original
Emacs was basically a collection of editing macros for TECO, which itself was
a rather silly text editor that grew over the years into a rather silly
programming language.  The first version of Emacs I used was a version, in 
TECO, supposedly derived from the Richard Stallman original from MIT (this
was at CMU in 1979).  While you never had to leave Emacs proper, you could
pop up a TECO buffer at any time and program/edit to your heart's content
directly in TECO.  Of course, lots of folks liked having that TECO around
for writing macros, so when it came actually implementing Emacs in a real 
language like C, some programming language or another was usually implemented
as well.  The other popular Emacs at CMU at the time was James Gosling's 
version, which ran on PDP-11s instead of DEC-20s and had a lisp-ish macro
language called Mock-Lisp, or M-Lisp for short.  Not as powerful as GNU's
E-Lisp, but pretty nice as compared to TECO.

The original MicroEmacs program didn't have any macro capability, but it
did handle the simple editing command set (no M-X capabilities) and seemed
to me to more along the lines of TECO or Gosling's rather than GNU as
far as the command set it knows.  This has split in several directions;
The current MicroEmacs (V3.10 or so), MG (formerly MicroGNU, so-called because
it attempted to use more GNU than Gosling's commands), the MEmacs that 
comes on the Amiga's Extras disk, and probably many others all trace back 
to the original C language MicroEmacs.  The latest V3.10 has a kinda Forth-ish 
macro language.  MG and MEmacs don't have a language, but they do handle 
keyboard macros (eg, they remember a sequence of Emacs commands to let 
you build quick macros).  MG does allow key rebinding, it has very nice 
menu, window, and mouse support on the Amiga, and there's even a version 
as part of AmigaTeK that uses AREXX as it's macro language.  MEmacs is much
simpler, but it's been hacked on considerably by the Amiga folk here to
make it small and fast.

> I have occassionally toyed with the idea of using BlazinForth to write an
> Emacs, with forth as the macro language, and buffers as the file form....
> but my own native sloth has prevented such a development... any takers?

That'd be pretty interesting; more like the TECO version in philosophy.

>   joel.anderson@StPaul.NCR.COM   |UUCP: {rosevax, crash}!orbit!pnet51!jpa
-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
                    Too much of everything is just enough