Re: A question (confusion) about closure

viper-2 <visionat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 6, 3:57 am, Didier Verna <did...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Emacs Lisp is probably the worst Lisp dialect ever.

On the contrary, Emacs Lisp (Elisp) works very well for its
constitutents who use the dialect as it was intended - primarily to
customize and extend "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting,
real-time display editor" Emacs.

You have got to be kidding me. I don't see how being dynamically
scoped by default helps you in any way (even in a self-blah-blah editor
in which user options could simply be defined in terms of CL's
defparameter). I don't see how not having lexical scope helps you in any
way either.

On the other hand, I (among others) maintain XEmacs, Gnus, BBDB, and a
few packages of my own, and I can tell you how I wish Emacs Lisp had
CLOS, or simply were just Common-Lisp in the first place.

BTW, what exactly do you mean by "customize and extend [...]" ? Today,
XEmacs has 30% (~ 150000 lines) of its code base written in elisp; Gnus
alone amounts to 140000 lines, and I'm not even speaking of XEmacs'SUMO
tarballs (the whole external libraries shipped as packages). I wouldn't
call elisp an "extension language" anymore.


--
5th European Lisp Workshop at ECOOP 2008, July 7: http://elw.bknr.net/2008/

Didier Verna, didier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier

EPITA / LRDE, 14-16 rue Voltaire Tel.+33 (0)1 44 08 01 85
94276 Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, France Fax.+33 (0)1 53 14 59 22 didier@xxxxxxxxxx
.

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