Talk:Emacs Lisp

Tail-call optimization

Are there sources that support that Emacs doesn't do tail-call optimization?? I ask because there's a chapter in the Emacs Lisp manual explaining how to write functions using tail recursion and the drawbacks of not using it. --SugarKane (talk) 02:31, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

You are refering to the Emacs Lisp Introduction, not the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. The former is written by Robert J. Chassell, the later (mainly) by Richard Stallman. Robert J. Chassell is not one of the main Emacs developers, and may have introduced some generic Lisp advice (which is phrased in a way that is not definitive on the capabilities of Emacs). But the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual is silent on the subject. Googling around I can find quotes from people who should know (like Erik Naggum) that there is no tail call elimination, but not from sources that are reliable by the Wikipedia definition.--Per Abrahamsen (talk) 09:28, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Scoping

This is much too fine an article in order for me to edit it myself. Please allow a tiny question though. When talking about lexiacal and dynamic scoping you mix this term with binding. My idea would be to use scoping consistently. What do you think about it? Real nice work though. Cheers --Robert_Dober 19:46 Oct 14, 2002 (UTC)

That's a very good, unobjectionable suggestion. I made the change in this article, but you should go ahead and edit other articles as you see fit. (See Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages). --CYD

ELisp coding details

May I ask somebody to write something about the data structures and the building blocks already present in Emacs.

AFAIK there is a dictionary of key-bindings which maps keystrokes to function calls. How do I found out about the current line, the selection, the buffers? Some kind of coding patter description would be nice. --Hirzel 16:08 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This article is hardly the time and the place for teaching Emacs Lisp in practice. You will find that Emacs in fact comes with very nice on-line Info documentation, which covers this topic quite nicely (as far as I was able to understand your question ...)-- era (Talk | History) 12:29, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

About the links

There are several links to the Emacs editor. Not a programming language. I suggest to consider removing links not to the ELisp language?

Elisp is notable solely for its use in Emacs, I thought. --maru (talk) contribs 16:12, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

History of Emacs Lisp

Hello. I wonder if someone can add something about the history of Emacs Lisp. When was it originated, by whom, who have the major contributors been, from where did they get their inspiration, etc. I'd add it myself but I don't know anything about it. Cheers. 207.174.201.18 21:38, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Gwern's edit on 2006-09-27 was apparently contributed in response to this request.-- era (Talk | History) 12:37, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Removed the {{manual}} tag

I've reviewed the article and made changes in all sections (as have other editors in the months since the tag was added). There's definitely no {{manual}} problem in the current version of the article, so I've removed the tag. There is a little bit of code in the "Example" section, but it's absolutely not an Emacs Lisp programming lesson.

I'd actually recommending expanding the article with more examples showing what makes Emacs Lisp different from other Lisp dialects (specific features) and other scripting languages (the focus on doing everything via text manipulation). Gronky (talk) 01:07, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

The example section still has a bit too much of a chatty, tutorialesque feel to it, but I agree that this isn't so problematic as to require a cleanup tag. Thanks for the work. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 11:17, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Other Emacs variants

Omitted from the list of Emacs variants is the version Robert (Bob) Frankston wrote in PL/I for Pr1me Computer's PrimOS. I'm not sure where any details of that implementation could be found. However, I think it deserves mentioning as in many ways it was one of the finest implementations ever written at least in my humble opinion. Notably it had its own version of elisp. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.55.54.40 (talk) 06:12, 25 May 2014 (UTC)