Re: Emacs Book Vs Emacs Manuals

[Emanuel Berg]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

>> Macros are even in the *name* of Emacs so they
>> would seem essential. That christening was a long
>> time ago, of course.
>
> Those were other macros, AFAIK.

A keyboard macro is a sequence of interactive input
actions, and the corresponding commands are executed
just as if the user were hitting that
selfsame sequence.

Yeah, it is called a "keyboard" macro to distinguish
them from programming macros, which are programs that
produce a program which is then executed. But despite
the name, if you are unfortunate enough to use
a mouse, as an interactive input device, I'm sure such
actions can be included in keyboard macros as well.

Anyway, I suspect the development was like this.
People were using TECO, and they found they were
repeating the same keyboard patterns to do the same
things over and over. So they started to record those
into macros. After a while, they became to the user
indistinguishable from functions. When enough such
macros/functions had been assembled and collected,
they put it together into Emacs. Perhaps they then
realized some function was missing, so they wrote the
odd man TECO macro to fill the gap.

Feel free to correct this story, which is based solely
on shamanism.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573