emacs and squeak, again...

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Sun Feb 25 21:19:19 UTC 2001


On Sun, 25 Feb 2001, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
[snip]
>   We don't have to port the Emacs lisp interpreter code
> (including the memory management and other things) of Emacs.
[snip]
>   On the other hand, why I think it would be "lots of labor"
> is that the presense of the "imcompatibility" of Elisp and
> Squeak.  For example, Elisp is dynamic scoped language while
> Squeak is not.  Look at this:
[snip]
>   This is just an example, but there would be issues that
> make simple mapping from Elisp function to Squeak method
> impossible.

But one could write an Elisp interpreter, or even a compiler to Squeak
*bytecode* (hmm. doesn't Elisp have a bytecode set?)

A similar project has been undertaken by Per Bothner as part of Kawa:

	http://jemacs.sourceforge.net/

Since this maps emacs to the JVM, it might be worth examining the
code/design. (Er...for those interested in such a project!)

	http://jemacs.net/Freenix00/Freenix00.html

If we're talking editor stuff (in somewhat more generality than just
"cloning emacs"), there seem to be a number of desirable features:

1) Easier key and mouse binding.

2) Better handling of huge buffers/text files. Heck, better handling of
merely "somewhat large" ones would be good :)

3) Make it easier to hook into the change/version/pretty
printing/filein&out system. For example, I'd love to have HTML and LaTeX
editors based on the classbrowser (with versioning at the paragraph or
page level, etc. etc.) But, afaik, it's not trivial to specify a new
"sort" of changes or sources file and then to get all the standard
conveniences rolling. (This is important for things like Pocket Smalltalk,
or other langauges implemented in Squeak.)

4) An inverted index free text search faculty, something like Lucene
	http://www.lucene.com/
No more "This search may take several minutes."!! :)

5) I'm sure there are many others :)

If an emacsy clone "fell out" of improved text handling free, that would
be cool on *many* levels!

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.





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