Re: [Hong Feng <address@hidden>] article about GNU Emacs

[William M. Perry]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't have time to do it either, I think.

I have a friend who is an author, and uses emacs for all of his book
editing and technical writing (day job).  I'll check with him and see if he
would be interested.  Could someone forward me the article that Hong Feng
referenced?  I didn't see it attached as he says.  Would be a good starting
point

As for the running column on Emacs, I think if 5 or 6 people could do
round-robin authoring of articles, that might be better than having a
single author.  Both in terms of diversity of features that the articles
cover, and from an availability-of-the-author perspective.  We're all
really busy, but doing a 1 or 2 page article every 6 months would be
doable.

I could contribute an article or two on the dynamic loading that I've
currently done for XEmacs and keep meaning to do for Emacs.  Ditto for the
foreign-function interface.  I want to find time over the holidays to make
this much more portable and not rely on the GTK object system.[1]

It would be GREAT to have something like a technical track as well,
explaining the underpinnings of the new redisplay engine, etc, etc.  I
think this would help more developers feel comfortable working on the core
C code.  The main reason I do more C level work for XEmacs is that the
abstractions and semi-OO work they've done makes it easier to understand
smaller pieces of the code.  Emacs has always been a bit more
intimidating.

-Bill P.

[1] In case anybody on the -dev list wants to work on this with me, let me
know.  The FFI interface allows you to do something like:

(dll-load "/usr/local/lib/libexpat.so")
=> t
(import-function pointer XML_ParserCreate (string . encoding))
=> nil

And now the function XML-ParserCreate is visible from lisp.  90% of the GTK
bindings for elisp that I did use this interface, and it works great.
This can make small interfaces to external libraries very quick and easy.