From: Tim Menzies
Subject: Should i use GNU EMACS-lisp for development?
Date: 
Message-ID: <1994Jan5.011720.28644@usage.csd.unsw.OZ.AU>
i was just helping a beginner with gnu-emacs and trying oto
interface it into KCL. she asked me a question i can't answer:
"why learn 2 lisps?" why not just develop my system in emacs
lisp?" 

i made some noises re portability and the virtues of common lisp
but she replied "but can it be used for application development?"

anyone?

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From: Kelly Murray
Subject: Re: Should i use GNU EMACS-lisp for development?
Date: 
Message-ID: <2geuas$4cs@snoopy.cis.ufl.edu>
In article <·····················@usage.csd.unsw.OZ.AU>, ····@cse.unsw.edu.au (Tim Menzies) writes:
|> i was just helping a beginner with gnu-emacs and trying oto
|> interface it into KCL. she asked me a question i can't answer:
|> "why learn 2 lisps?" why not just develop my system in emacs
|> lisp?" 
|> 
|> i made some noises re portability and the virtues of common lisp
|> but she replied "but can it be used for application development?"
|> 
|> anyone?
|> 

One could argue that GnuEmacsLisp is probably *more* portable than Common Lisp.
The downside is a) It's not very fast,  b) Debugging support isn't the best.
But other than that, why not?  We have some sys-admin tools here that run on
top of Emacs, which is run as a batch program.  

-Kelly Murray (···@prl.ufl.edu)
From: Michael Ernst
Subject: Re: Should i use GNU EMACS-lisp for development?
Date: 
Message-ID: <MERNST.94Jan6084103@woodpecker.lcs.mit.edu>
In article <··········@snoopy.cis.ufl.edu> ···@prl.ufl.edu (Kelly Murray) writes:
> One could argue that GnuEmacsLisp is probably *more* portable than Common
> Lisp.
> The downside is a) It's not very fast,  b) Debugging support isn't the best.

Debugging for GNU Emacs Lisp is superior to any other Lisp system I've
used.  (If commercial Lisp systems are up to its standard by now, I haven't
seen them.)  If you use Edebug, you get great source-level debugging.
Emacs Lisp also has advice and most of the other bells and whistles you
would want.

For non-compute-intensive jobs, Emacs Lisp is my language of choice.

					-Michael Ernst
					 ······@theory.lcs.mit.edu
From: Daniel LaLiberte
Subject: Re: Should i use GNU EMACS-lisp for development?
Date: 
Message-ID: <LIBERTE.94Jan5131649@ebony.cs.uiuc.edu>
   From: ····@cse.unsw.edu.au (Tim Menzies)

   " why not just develop my system in emacs lisp?" 

   i made some noises re portability and the virtues of common lisp
   but she replied "but can it be used for application development?"

Depends on the application.  In general, Emacs Lisp is a real language
but with limited I/O appropriate for text manipulation.  You can
communicate with the outside world via files or processes.  If you
need some CL features, a new cl.el package does a fine job though it
does not emulate everything in CL.

Emacs Lisp is relatively slow, especially in function calls.  Use
iteration instead of recursion if you can.  The slowness is not
important for most interactive tasks, but if you are doing some
big computation, it can be noticeable.

Emacs Lisp is very portable across all the platforms that run Emacs.
There are some significant differences between lemacs and fsf emacs,
if you are using features new to those versions.

Emacs Lisp has a great source-level debugger, if I do say so myself.

Dan LaLiberte
·······@cs.uiuc.edu
(Fight interface copyrights and software patents.
 Join the League for Programming Freedom: ···@uunet.uu.net)