$ find emacs-23.2/ -name \*.c | xargs cat | wc -l 339497 $ find emacs-23.2/ -name \*.el | xargs cat | wc -l 1391690 Seeing that about 80% of Emacs code

$ find emacs-23.2/ -name \*.c | xargs cat | wc -l 339497 $ find emacs-23.2/ -name \*.el | xargs cat | wc -l 1391690 Seeing that about 80% of Emacs code is Lisp, not to mention the countless extensions that don't ship with Emacs, and much of the C code is geared towards being called from Lisp, suggesting to replace Emacs Lisp by Perl is essentially suggesting to rewrite Emacs from scratch.