Re: Lookarounds and recursion in Emacs regexes

[Emanuel Berg]

Stefan Monnier via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:

>> [re: Elisp, I heard GIMP once used Lisp as its
>>  configuration/extension language, only at some point switched
>>  to Python for that. That's not gonna happen to Emacs, is it?
>>  *runs away*]
>
> There's a common confusion that ELisp is some kind of
> extension language for Emacs. That's not quite true.
> ELisp is an *implementation* language of Emacs (along with
> C for the other half).

Okay, so Emacs is implementation, configuration _and_ extension.

C is to most implementation and that's it and unawarely so
probably most often, but with dynamic modules, it can be
extension as well, I suppose it could be configuration as well
but again in practice who does that and what benefit would
that be ...

Or am I wrong?

> It doesn't prevent adding other extension languages, nor
> even does it necessarily prevent changing the implementation
> language to another one in theory.

I know!

> But in practice it has discouraged most attempts to provide
> another language (except arguably for the "statically scoped
> dialect of ELisp", because its interoperability with the
> original ELisp was sufficiently smooth).

But didn't you have the idea of adding a third layer language,
don't remember what that idea was, the language was to be
created for this purpose so a brand new one was discussed,
maybe it stopped at discussions?

What would have been the idea with that?

People say Emacs Lisp is slow but to me it feels pretty fast?

But I think there are other problems - lack of standard
libraries - a lot of functions everywhere that do similar
things, do-something do-the-same-buffer do-the-same-region
do-the-same-no-properties etc. Too much looking up stuff all
the time is a problem. Also too long words all the time ...
reduce typing to increase development speed. so start -> beg,
`require' -> req, `expt' -> **, all that, also make all final
args of functions where nil makes sense optional so trailing
nils can be pruned, just reduce typing if one cares
about speed.

Its biggest problem? It's too sexy for it's shirt!

-- 
underground experts united
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