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Yet ironically the author of emacs virulently despises Tcl, which is founded on precisely the same concept.
by blacksqr 15y ago
Yet ironically the author of emacs virulently despises Tcl, which is founded on precisely the same concept.
- tadfisher 15y agoI can see legitimate reasons why you'd want your text editor to display and manipulate everything as text but not want your programming language to be limited to the same.
- xyzzyz 15y agoThe argument for "everything-is-text" approach in Emacs interface is that the text is easy to work with and the possibilities are wide -- in this case for human. This is precisely the same argument for the choice of Lisp as a programming language the Emacs is based on -- the Lisp code is again easy to work with and gives a programmer lots of freedom, but it's easier for programs to work with S-expressions than text. In other words, in the realm of code, the equivalent of "text" is "data structure".
- bch 15y agoI don't think Stallman despised Tcl because of its EIAS (Everything is a String) philosophy. He was wary of the Tcl relationship (at that time) with Sun Microsystems, and Stallman was a longtime Lisper anyway; I wouldn't be surprised if his opinion was that everything outside of Lisp sucked. EIAS is a powerful concept, though, which with Tcl's conceptually simple rules allow it to be homoiconic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconic) and allow for some interesting and _pleasant_ programming. To head off one common misconception of EIAS, Tcl does not actually internally represent its code only as strings. It byte-compiles. Pure string-only parsing was replaced with byte-compiled code in 1997.