[rescue] OT: broken de-MIME-ers should be shot! ;-)

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 04:29:30PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 05:27:24PM -0400, James Sharp wrote:
> > Whynot just use emacs as the OS.
> 
> I'm sure some linux weenie out there is working on this
> already.

The big problem with emacs as the OS is that it's lisp is rather inferior,
despite the fact that it refers to other lisps as the inferior one.  There
are two projects working on replacing elisp with scheme.  If either succeeded,
then you could theoretically merge emacs with some other lisp os project.

A more promising idea would be to use the lisp (or scheme of your choice), and
write an elisp transformer for it (to transform the elisp into common lisp,
scheme, whatever).  The initial part of the project is easy, but as always,
the devil is in the details.  But, doing so would mean that you just would
have to replace the C underpinnings of emacs with lisp/scheme, then the bulk
of emacs would just run on top.

So in reality, the fastest way to an emacs OS probably would be to port 
hemlock to mzscheme (hemlock is an emacs like editor that comes with MIT 
Scheme), then use an elisp to scheme transformer to run emacs on top of
scheme, then merge with the mzscheme OS project.  Once the elisp to scheme
transformer was done, the rest should fly.  There exist common lisp to scheme
transformers, but I'm not sure if they would be a usefull starting place for
elisp.  

If only emacs hadn't used that bastard custom lisp that they did, then this
whole idea would be a lot easier.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd