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From: bobo@avogadro.arc.nasa.gov (Mark Friedman)
Subject: Re: extensibility (was: Why you should not use Tcl)
In-Reply-To: ron@topaz.sensor.com's message of 28 Sep 1994 11:18:33 GMT
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References: <9409232314.AA29957@mole.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <364bq2$mjd@topaz.sensor.com>
	<36a5ri$kko@agate.berkeley.edu> <36bje9$h3c@topaz.sensor.com>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 1994 19:02:53 GMT
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In article <36bje9$h3c@topaz.sensor.com> ron@topaz.sensor.com (Ron
Natalie) writes:

   Brian Harvey (bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU) wrote:

   : In my opinion it's a myth that the users want smoothly packaged
   : software that does "what they want" and can't be customized.

   Gnu EMACS has implemented for it a news reader and a WWW browser
   for example.  It does neither one particularly well.

Neither of these points is relevant to whether elisp is useful as a
customization language. I happen to like the news reader though.

I also think that the EMACS example is a bit of a red herring because
editors are often called upon to be more general than other
applications.

   Why do I need to put an entire lisp implementation when all the user
   wants to do is iterate a process over several steps or rearrange the
   menus a bit.  

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "entire lisp implementation". If
you mean something like a complete Common Lisp implementation, I'd
probably agree with you. But there are small complete lisp
implementations.

I think that Brian's point is that you want a "real" programming
language to do customization. It doesn't need every library that Emacs
or Common Lisp (or C for that matter) provides. The application will
provide the library functions (i.e. the primitives) appropriate for
its domain. But the extension language should be a genuine powerful
"programming" language, not some "scripting" or "macro" language.

The core argument about Tcl has been (or at least should have been)
about whether Tcl qualifies as a reasonable programming language.

-Mark
-- 
Mark Friedman
NASA-Ames Research Center
MS 269-2
Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000

vmail: (415) 604-0573
email: bobo@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov
