Advantages of everything-is-text

Re: the large boat, I imagine that's a photo of (a replica of) The Endeavour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Endeavour), sailed by Captain Cook. Given that The Endeavour is both the blog's and the image's name, and that the blog author's surname is Cook.

I can see legitimate reasons why you'd want your text editor to display and manipulate everything as text but not want your programming language to be limited to the same.

The argument for "everything-is-text" approach in Emacs interface is that the text is easy to work with and the possibilities are wide -- in this case for human. This is precisely the same argument for the choice of Lisp as a programming language the Emacs is based on -- the Lisp code is again easy to work with and gives a programmer lots of freedom, but it's easier for programs to work with S-expressions than text.

In other words, in the realm of code, the equivalent of "text" is "data structure".

I don't think Stallman despised Tcl because of its EIAS (Everything is a String) philosophy. He was wary of the Tcl relationship (at that time) with Sun Microsystems, and Stallman was a longtime Lisper anyway; I wouldn't be surprised if his opinion was that everything outside of Lisp sucked.

EIAS is a powerful concept, though, which with Tcl's conceptually simple rules allow it to be homoiconic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconic) and allow for some interesting and _pleasant_ programming.

To head off one common misconception of EIAS, Tcl does not actually internally represent its code only as strings. It byte-compiles. Pure string-only parsing was replaced with byte-compiled code in 1997.

Is there a port of it you'd recommend looking at? The only ones I've found look abandoned (Plan9 from User Space, and Acme Stand Alone Complex).