Re: Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language

[David Kastrup]

Daniel Colascione <address@hidden> writes:

> On 10/18/2015 10:52 AM, John Wiegley wrote:
>>>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>>> When we need to use Guile APIs from Emacs. That's one of the
>>> advantages of using Guile: that it implements a lot of functionality
>>> which it would be good to have in Emacs.
>> 
>> Total agreement! I've been wanting a Guile-based Emacs since 1998, if
>> for no other reason than that I could have used call/cc in Eshell,
>> instead of the horrendous CPS hack that exists there now.
>
> You have generators in elisp already.

Well, lexical-binding is a lot more recent than the start of the
GuileEmacs project, and part of the appeal of GuileEmacs was indeed to
have lexical bindings.  But that does not make GUILE worse but rather
Elisp better.

> Wanting to use one language is, IMHO, a poor choice for wanting to
> completely swap out a language. I am opposed to Guilemacs, not only on
> technical grounds, but also because elisp is essential to Emacs (and
> not just an optional extension system), and I want its implementation
> to live alongside the rest of the Emacs core code.

I'm not convinced that it's a bad idea to separate the Elisp
implementation more from the Emacs core code.  It provides a
well-documented interface between the two: hacking the C code in Emacs
remains a considerable inside job and is not documented on its own.

So I consider this a strength rather than a weakness of the GuileEmacs
proposition in the long term.

-- 
David Kastrup