Hacker News Reader

Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

1985, not 1976, though. GNU Emacs is just one of the many emacsen and doesn't share code with previous versions.

That said, it's interesting how for example original keybindings from 1976 still survive, despite being effectively a result of a quick email poll and scavenging of people's dotfiles.

View on HN

Apparently it's 1981 - RMS started with the codebase of Gosling Emacs, but then quickly rewrote most of it when he replaced the Lisp implementation. Still, the blank-file moment was apparently with Gosling.

Gosling is famous for (well, not really) something called Mock Lisp: an evaluation language that worked over text that contains parentheses, evaluating the literal character-level representation. This was used in an Emacs-like editor Gosling wrote. It must be that one.

I'm guessing Stallman would have been replacing Mock Lisp with a real Lisp.

EDIT: well, doh, the Wikipedia page on GNU Emacs (which I have never visited until now, since I don't use Emacs) confirms that:

"GNU Emacs was initially based on Gosling Emacs, but Stallman's replacement of its Mocklisp interpreter with a true Lisp interpreter required that nearly all of its code be rewritten."

The existence of this relationship explains why there is a MockLisp article in the Wikipedia at all.

I enjoy the date of 1976 as the origin date re: Emacs as teco macros because that's the same year vi was born (and thus, the war began)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com