Re: [tlug] elisp interpreter

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:
 >> On Saturday, 31 October 2015, Jean-Christophe Helary <brandelune@example.com>
wrote:

 >> I'm looking for a way to elegantly run elisp programs outside of Emacs.
 >> [...] it does not have to be Emacs interpreting the thing

It could be Guile-Emacs, XEmacs, or SXEmacs. ;-)  What's wrong with
*emacs --batch?  (Besides being gadawful slow....)

There's librep (IIRC it's the engine in the Sawfish window manager)
which was pretty close in 1999 or 2000.  Not any more....

 > Well, if it doesn't need to be Emacs interpreting the thing, you could
 > write an elisp interpreter in Perl or Python or whatever pretty
 > easily.

Nix.  Emacs Lisp is a real bugbear to implement accurately because of
all the hinky stuff it does when evaluating variables, including
"locals" because of its default "dynamic scope".  Even modern GNU
Emacs with optional lexical binding doesn't really help.  And of
course it's all the hinky stuff that makes elisp essentially slow.

 > What are you trying to accomplish with these elisp programs? Could
 > you easily port them to Sceme or Common Lisp, or even Clojure?

If it doesn't depend on Emacs libraries, Common Lisp is probably the
path of least resistance (#f v. nil and Lisp-2 v. Lisp-1 are two
important issues that are really annoying, although they're easy to
work around when you're only doing gov't-quality work ... so much for
"elegance", though :-).