Re: question

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Calin Vatavu wrote:

> Now at the core of Emacs is ELisp

That's not entirely true.  At the core of Emacs is a Lisp interpreter 
written in C.  Many display- and OS-related primitives work directly on 
the C level.

> but should I dare to hope that this will  change some day?

Hardly.  It's too much work, and the benefits are not really evident.  
IMHO, at least.

> I mean, if I want to add a new programming mode to emacs 
> (graphical structograms etc. see X32 editor at 
> http://www.blue-river-software.com) I don't think I could write it in 
> ELisp.Maybe in Perl, Python or even C. 

I don't see anything in X32 that cannot be done in Emacs.  Many of those 
features are already supported by Emacs even today.

> And there is another issue: if you want Emacs to stay alive in the future 
> then you should change it at its core. Look at the sentmail and qmail: 
> sendmail is cool, but very hard to configure, qmail is not. That's why so 
> many sites quit using sendmail for qmail. 

I don't see any contradiction between customizability and core 
stability.  Customization is a user-level facility, so it's much higher 
in level than the core issues.  With enough work, you can build an easily 
customizable package on top of a lousy core, and vice versa.