From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!deine.net!hamster.europeonline.net!newsfeed.europeonline.net!nslave.kpnqwest.net!nloc.kpnqwest.net!nmaster.kpnqwest.net!nreader3.kpnqwest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Why is Scheme not a Lisp? References: <87pu28kzjy.fsf@charter.net> <87u1rkp2vc.fsf@becket.becket.net> <874rjkoyvn.fsf@becket.becket.net> Mail-Copies-To: never From: Erik Naggum Message-ID: <3225051630823951@naggum.net> Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 25 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 23:40:19 GMT X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@KPNQwest.no X-Trace: nreader3.kpnqwest.net 1016062819 193.71.199.50 (Thu, 14 Mar 2002 00:40:19 MET) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 00:40:19 MET Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:28839 * Thomas Bushnell, BSG | I think one difference in retrospect is that Common Lisp is very, um, | non-lightweight. Even the 1984 spec is *very* rich. While that richness | is one of the great strengths of Common Lisp, and one of the things that | accounts for its popularity, it is also a detriment to using it as an | extension language for something like Emacs. I disagree. Emacs Lisp would have been a lot simpler if it were based on Common Lisp. A lot. Object-orientation Common Lisp style would have made Emacs a lot more customizable and much friendlier to Emacs hackers (old sense). | People already complain about Emacs being too huge; adding in the entire | library of Common Lisp would be, um, painful. Not so. Trust me on this, I spent a year or so working on a design for CLEMACS, until it became clear to me that I would have to maintain _continued_ source-level compatibility with Emacs Lisp, and that caused me to rethink the whole idea and its desirability, because I had worked too long on Emacs Lisp to regard this as a simple, solvable problem. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.