Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!glacier!elliott From: elliott@glacier.steinmetz Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Re: AMACS - ProDOS text editor for the Apple 2 Message-ID: <11363@steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 25 Jun 88 17:53:54 GMT References: <8806221454.AA19776@wheaties.ai.mit.edu> <8806221300.aa19421@SMOKE.BRL.ARPA> <11339@steinmetz.ge.com> <8149@brl-smoke.ARPA> Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com Reply-To: elliott@glacier.steinmetz.ge.com (Jim Elliott) Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY Lines: 35 In article <8149@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB)) writes: >I wasn't aware that Stallman owned EMACS. Real EMACS is a humongous TECO >macro. So there. What you are referring to is the initial implementation of EMACS. Yes, it was done in macros in the TECO editor, which were written by (guess who?) Richard Stallman. However, I doubt many people use that implementation anymore. Stallman's current Emacs, GNU-Emacs is vastly technically superior. And it is free. GNU-Emacs is "owned" by the Free Software Foundation, and has been ported to many machines. If it works on your machine, you can get it for free. That is the way the licensing agreement works. (See "The GNU Manifesto" for a more detailed description of the Free Software Foundation's philosophy). When I mentioned Stallman's concern over calling a small subset of Emacs an "Emacs", I was referring to a quote from him in an article describing the history and evolution of Emacs-like editors. There are some extremely subtle and powerful things about Emacs which are often not implemented in subsets (since they require Emacs to be a very fast and efficient interpreted language, and are very taxing on small systems). Stallman does not want people who are using these subsets to mistakenly believe they are using a full Emacs, for they then may never know the full power of an open, extensible editor, and the kind of environment for thought and creation that it provides. . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . ... . . Jim Elliott / ...!seismo!uunet!steinmetz!crd!elliott / "Don't look, son, it's / Jim_Elliott%mts@itsgw.rpi.edu [school] a secular humanist!" / (or) elliott@ge-crd.arpa [work] . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . . . ... . .