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elisp -> Python (was Re: [OT] Emacs, Eclipse, Leo (was Re: IDE

Paul Rubin http
Wed Jul 21 18:54:19 EDT 2004 
sjdevnull at yahoo.com (G. S. Hayes) writes:
> > How about just reusing the elisp interpreter in its C form
> 
> Given the Deep Magic emacs does during the build process, I'm not sure
> how easy that would be.  If I recall correctly, it builds a minimal
> Lisp interpreter, uses that to run a bunch of Lisp code, and then
> coredumps the running image into a new executable. 

That step is optional and with current computers, it's not really
necessary.  It was intended to avoid making Emacs spend time loading
the Lisp files for the standard editing functions every time you
started Emacs.  On the old Vaxes, that could take over a minute,
especially when other users were sharing the cpu.  But on a reasonable
workstation these days, it takes less than a second, so you don't
really need the unexec any more.

> Even if you could sort that out, you still have the problem of
> figuring out how to wrap all the Lisp objects with appropriate
> Python objects.

I think writing some Lisp/Python hybrid interpreter is possible but
doing a direct translation of Emacs Lisp to Python isn't really feasible.
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