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Concept
Emacs Lisp
Summary
Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs (a text editor family most commonly associated with GNU Emacs and XEmacs). It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter. Emacs Lisp is also termed Elisp, although there are also older, unrelated Lisp dialects with that name.
Users of Emacs commonly write Emacs Lisp code to customize and extend Emacs. Other options include the Customize feature that's been in GNU Emacs since version 20. Itself written in Emacs Lisp, Customize provides a set of preferences pages allowing the user to set options and preview their effect in the running Emacs session. When the user saves their changes, Customize simply writes the necessary Emacs Lisp code to the user's , which can be set to a special file that only Customize uses, to avoid the possibility of altering the user's own file.
Emacs Lisp can also function as a scripting language, much like the Unix Bourne shell or Perl, by calling Emacs in batch mode. In this way it may be called from the command line or via an executable file, and its editing functions, such as buffers and movement commands are available to the program just as in the normal mode. No user interface is presented when Emacs is started in batch mode; it simply executes the passed-in script and exits, displaying any output from the script.
Emacs Lisp is most closely related to Maclisp, with some later influence from Common Lisp. It supports imperative and functional programming methods. Lisp was the default extention language for Emacs derivatives such as EINE and ZWEI. When Richard Stallman forked Gosling Emacs into GNU Emacs, he also chose Lisp as the extension language, because of its powerful features, including the ability to treat functions as data. Although the Common Lisp standard had yet to be formulated, Scheme existed at the time but Stallman chose not to use it because of its comparatively poor performance on workstations (as opposed to the minicomputers that were Emacs' traditional home), and he wanted to develop a dialect which he thought would be more easily optimized.
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