is there summary of template systems for emacs?

[Xah Lee]

there seems to be a lot elisp packages for defining templates. Has
anyone studied them and can give a comparison? Basically, i just need
a brief explanation of their syntax and feature.

the emacswiki page
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryTemplates
is very helpful in listing them but a clear summary and comparison is
lacking.

here's what i found so far.

• skeleton.el is probably the oldest. It is officially part of gnu
emacs with full info doc. But its info doc is rather verbose and hard
to read.

• tempo.el is also officially part of gnu emacs. But other than being
included, there seems to be no mentioning of it, and lacks any doc
other than the few paragraphs in source code and chaotic info on
emacswiki.

the above's template syntax are lisp code, so it requires lisp
knowledge to use. There are several more elisp syntax templates:
Tempo, tempoSnippets.

consider how the advancement of technology today (looking at other
IDEs, etc), i think template systems based on lisp syntax is rather
obsolete. There are several plain text based template systems, which i
think are more proper today for emacs going forward:

MsfAbbrev, Snippet, TemplatesMode, ElseMode, YaSnippetMode.

I don't yet know their pro and cons... one wonders why there are so
many. I certainly hope emacs would choose ONE to be bundled as THE
template system for emacs.

With some cursory reading (spent like 3 hours now), it seems YaSnippet
is the most modern and feature rich...

it seems that Snippet is written in 2005 spurred by the Mac OS's
TextMate editor. Then, the author of YaSnippet tried to improve on
that and created SmartSnippet, but further improvement results in
YaSnippet. Looking at YaSnippet site, it seems to have extensive
documentation and examples. (a whole website dedicated to it)

e.g.
http://pluskid.lifegoo.com/upload/project/yasnippet/doc/define_snippet.html

though i'm haven't yet found out how other text based template system
compares.

Is there anyone, or authors of one the above, who actually studied the
whole and can give a summary?

Anyone got more info to add?

I'm interested because recently i'm writing a lsl mode. The lang lsl
has over 600 hundreds functions for scripting in the virtual world
environment Second Life  ... Being a game engine scripting lang, it is
unlike typical programing lang. Its hundreds of functions each has
unusual parameters. So a template set for lsl lang would be very
helpful for my mode.

• Linden Scripting Language with Emacs
  http://xahlee.org/sl/ls-emacs.html

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄