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.
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