Re: Differences between Elisp and Lisp

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

"Daniel R. Anderson" <dan@mathjunkies.com> writes:

> On emacswiki.org there is a "wish list".  Quite a few people want emacs
> to be based on another version of LISP.  Out of curiosity, what is it
> that makes elisp inherently bad, or why would people want it to be
> changed?

There's nothing inherently bad about Emacs Lisp, in my opinion.  I
think it's a cute language that fun to work with.

However, it has some peculiarities that many people find
disconcerting.  For instance -- all variables have dynamic scope,
which is somewhat unusual these days.  There's no package system (to
avoid clobbering variables/functions from other packages).  It
doesn't have much of an object system, and dispatching functions
based on type would be nice.

But there are really only two things that I think are really
important.

1) Emacs Lisp is kinda slow.

2) Emacs Lisp is single threaded.

But I like Emacs Lisp.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen