EMACS and Lisp

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Mon Nov 20 17:43:22 UTC 2006


On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 10:51:19AM -0500, William O'Higgins Witteman wrote:
> I have heard a great deal of talk about Emacs and Lisp, some of it
> plainly inflammatory, but much of it seemingly well-reasoned and sane,
> from people whose opinions I tend to trust.  I wanted to try these
> things out, but I have some questions:
> 
> 1.  Can I get Emacs to run in a terminal?  When ever I launch it, it
> opens up a separate window, which doesn't work for me when I am logged
> in remotely.

Well as long as your copy of emacs is compiled to support terminals in
addition to X then it should work fine in just a terminal.  xemacs of
course does not.

> 2.  How does Lisp work?  Is it interpreted like Perl or Python, or
> compiled like C?  How portable is it - if I installed it at work on a
> Windoze machine, would the Lisp code I write on Linux work?

elisp code is emacs specific.  It doesn't care what OS you run emacs on,
the elisp code runs just fine on the emacs OS.  It is interpreted I
believe to a type of byte code which is then run by a type of virtual
machine or something like that.

> 3.  Which Lisp?  I hear Lisp spoken of in the same sentence as Smalltalk
> and Scheme - are they mostly the same?  Is common Lisp the way to go?

elisp: emacs lisp.

> Any personal experiences to share or resources to recommend?  Thanks.

I stay away from emacs. :)

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list