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From: whm@bocklin.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: To GNU or not to GNU?
Message-ID: <375@bocklin.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 05:42:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: bocklin.375
Posted: Tue Oct  1 05:42:16 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Oct-85 06:28:07 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Dept of CS, U of Arizona, Tucson
Lines: 33

I've been a user of Gosling's/Unipress Emacs for several years now, but
I've recently found myself pondering if I should switch to GNU Emacs.

Some of the arguments I've seen for GNU Emacs (in no particular order):

	"It's free." -- That's a good point, but we've already got most
	everything in sight licensed for Unipress Emacs.
	 
	"It has a real Lisp (cons and all)." -- To tell the truth, I'm
	not too wild about Lisp.  Sure, Unipress Emacs has only Mock Lisp,
	but I've developed a unique solution for this particular problem
	and I consider this advantage of GNU Emacs over vanilla Unipress
	Emacs to be non-relevant (for my purposes).
	
	"It's bound to be popular." -- There's no denying this, but what
	advantage does this present?
	
	I guess it could be argued that the set of programmable-editing
	primitives in GNU Emacs is better than that of Unipress Emacs, but
	from what I've seen, the GNU function set doesn't represent a "leap"
	with respect to what's in Unipress Emacs or for that matter, CCA
	Emacs.

Note that I'm not interested in getting flamage started, I'm just honestly
debating whether a switch to GNU Emacs would be worthwhile or if I'm just
attracted to it because it's new and seems to meet the needs of many people.
	
Are there other reasons to switch to GNU Emacs?  If it's just the above,
I think I've talked myself into sticking with Unipress for a while longer.

					Bill Mitchell
					whm%arizona@csnet-relay
					{ihnp4,noao,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whm