27 Feb
2017
27 Feb
'17
12:32 a.m.
"Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> writes:
RMS credits Multics Emacs with the idea to use Lisp as the extension
language:
The language that you build your extensions on shouldn't be thought
of as a programming language in afterthought; it should be designed
as a programming language. In fact, we discovered that the best
programming language for that purpose was Lisp.
It was Bernie Greenberg, who discovered that it was. He wrote a
version of Emacs in Multics MacLisp, and he wrote his commands in
MacLisp in a straightforward fashion. The editor itself was written
entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a success great
programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the
secretaries in his office started learning how to use it.
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
I'd have
to check the chronology but I'm fairly sure that EINE
predates Gosling Emacs by several years: I'd assume that either EINE
is where Gosling got the idea, or that it was just obvious, since
Emacs came from an environment where implementing things in Lisp was
not a strange idea, to put it rather mildly.
Tim is right. EINE predates
Gosling's EMACS by a few years. Of course,
it uses LISP as an extension language not because they thought that would be
novel but since the whole thing was implemented in LISP to begin with (much
as you could extend the TECO EMACS with more TECO).