7. The emacs EditorIN THIS CHAPTER
In 1956 the Lisp (List processing) language was developed at MIT by John McCarthy. In its original conception, Lisp had only a few scalar (atomic) data types and only one data structure (page 929): a list. Lists could contain atomic data or perhaps other lists. Lisp supported recursion and nonnumeric data (exciting concepts in those FORTRAN and COBOL days) and, in the Cambridge culture at least, was once the favored implementation language. Richard Stallman and Guy Steele were part of this MIT Lisp culture. In 1975 they collaborated on emacs, which Stallman maintained by himself for a long time. This chapter discusses the emacs editor as implemented by the Free Software Foundation (GNU). The emacs home page is www.gnu.org/software/emacs. |