> But this gets folded in with a sort of handwavy argument about the gap-buffer enabling a certain kind of low-level programming Did we read the same thing? Th

> But this gets folded in with a sort of handwavy argument about the gap-buffer enabling a certain kind of low-level programming Did we read the same thing? The article explicitly disclaims the underlying data structure as irrelevant! Fancier programmers may talk about ropes and gap buffers as a way of optimizing how you store and modify text, and yet I must insist that this is still not a good enough answer to explain what a buffer is in Emacs. It’d satisfy the technical answer, but not the philosophical one. The words "gap", "data structure", etc. don't appear at all in the article after that.