From: Bob Riemenschneider
Subject: Re: In- and Out-of- core editors (was Re: Which one, Lisp or Scheme?)
Date:
Message-ID: <tpzpxhwta2.fsf@violet.csl.sri.com>
In article <···············@crawdad.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU> Marco Antoniotti
<·······@crawdad.icsi.berkeley.edu> writes:
> This thread about in-core editors and so on strikes me as a little
> "off". The ultimate structure editor for any Lisp (Elisp, Scheme or
> Common Lisp) is Emacs. :)
I'd agree that, overall, using Emacs is a win. But the Interlisp
structure editor did have some advantages. For instance, every once in
awhile, when you wound up in the debugger, it was nice to be able to do a
little surgery on the control structures of a function that you were in
and continue, rather than having to back up the stack to before the call
or figure out what value the function should have returned. And maybe the
fact that this style of editing encouraged you to look at programming as
modifying an image to make it do what you want rather than writing source
code -- e.g., you ended an Interlisp session by doing a SYSOUT,
effectively saving the image, not by saving the source code to be reloaded
later -- shouldn't be ignored. I think this encouraged a more
incremental, hackeresque view of the development process.
-- rar