Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup]

"John Wiegley" <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>>> Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> In large part because that reason, there are key are parts of the C core
>> that are only understood by one active hacker (being optimistic here). This
>> is a huge liability for Emacs. I don't know how this fact fits the "C is
>> working for us" stance.
>
> Of all the languages I know, I can't think of one that gives us
> everything we need: stability, performance, portability, a large
> potential contributor base (people who know C can learn the macro
> system Emacs uses), debugging tools, etc.

Lua is an impressive little and powerful language.  But you would not
want to build a Lisp-based system around it since Lisp's fundamental
data structure is the list, and Lua's fundamental data structure is the
table.  For writing something akin to Emacs from scratch, I'd consider
it a very nice choice.  And its program syntax fits on a single DIN-A5
page in the Reference Manual.

Now the thing people don't like about languages in the Lisp family is
the program syntax.  Which is sort of missing the point because Lisp
does not even have one.  It has a reader syntax (which is more of a
lexer than a parser) with a focus on lists, and you directly enter the
parse tree.

Which is akin to assembly language programming at the syntactical rather
than the code level (well, "car" does stand for "contents of address
register"), making Lisp a fun little system for goofing around with the
compiler.  Which is not really all that important in the context of an
editor.

But with the current code base in place, anything leaving Lisp behind is
going to leave Emacs behind and thus is going to be a different project.

-- 
David Kastrup