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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas
From: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: EMACS in VMS
Message-ID: <1201@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Oct-84 23:09:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1201
Posted: Tue Oct  9 23:09:20 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Oct-84 04:47:20 EDT
References: <143@ttidca.UUCP>
Reply-To: thomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas)
Organization: Univ of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 35

In article <143@ttidca.UUCP> mab@ttidca.UUCP (Michael A. Bloom) writes:
>Friends of mine who run CCA emacs are very pleased with it, and see
>Gosling's emacs as a toy.  CCA emacs is known to make much more efficient
>use of resources than Gosling's, as well as being more true to the emacs
>philosophy.

Gee, we all use Gosling emacs here, and I must admit I haven't seen a
recent version of CCA Emacs (except for talking to Z at trade shows),
but the few times I did use it, I found it much more difficult to deal
with (could be familiarity, of course), even though I "grew up with"
DEC-20 emacs.  I like the way that Gosling solved some of the human
interface issues much better than the original (so much for "true to the
emacs philosophy").  Also, until recently, CCA Emacs was not extensible,
whereas we have (probably) thousands of lines of Mlisp code for
Gosling's emacs.  It seems to me that Gosling's emacs has received much
more gratuitous hacking by its users than has CCA Emacs, although this
seems to have decreased somewhat lately (you want features, we got
features!).

It is true that Gosling's emacs tends to be a slower on some operations,
but this is much less true now than it was a couple of years ago.  The
major slowness factor still seems to be in the redisplay algorithm (a
theoretically nice, but somewhat slow n**2 algorithm).  Work has been
done on this (I may get it installed here if I ever get the time), but I
much prefer (until the load average goes up) waiting a little longer for
a refresh to the DEC-20 emacs habit of redrawing half the screen because
it thinks something might have changed in there somewhere (even though,
at 9600 baud, it might be faster, it's less distracting to me as a
user).

Enough rambling.  As the cliche goes, I might as well try to change
someone's religion.  But, to get those just trying to pick a religion
... :-)

=Spencer