[climacs-devel] A couple questions

[Robert Strandh]

Jacob Oursland writes:
 > 
 > I'd like to say how awesome Climacs is, particularly that it is as  
 > responsive now as Emacs is.  Thanks for the hard work in that  
 > accomplishment!!

All due to Troels Henriksen.  

 > But, I do have a couple questions:
 > 1.  What is the goal of Climacs?  Is it to be an Emacs clone?  Should  
 > elisp be the scripting language, or will it be an emacs-like tool?

Just to complement what Troels already wrote:

I do not claim to be able to dictate the goal of Climacs especially
since it is free software, but my initial goal was that NOT be an
Emacs clone, but an improvement on Emacs in view of the tools that are
now at our disposal (Common Lisp and CLIM/McCLIM) that were not
available to RMS when he wrote GNU Emacs. 

In particular, I don't think there is any point in trying to make
Climacs accept Elisp code.  The API of Climacs is sufficiently
different from that of GNU Emacs that this might be pretty hard, plus
that Elisp is relatively primitive to Common Lisp, the native language
of Climacs. 

The only reason one might want to be able to use Elisp would be to
take advantage of lots of existing subsystems of Emacs such as Gnus
and VM, but it has always been my opinion that those are subsystems of
Emacs exactly because Common Lisp and CLIM/McCLIM were not available.
I remain convinced that such subsystems should be written as general
CLIM applications (possibly using the ESA library if an Emacs
look-and-feel is desired) so that they can be integrated into a
growing toolbox of collaborating CLIM applications.

-- 
Robert Strandh

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
---------------------------------------------------------------------