whm@bocklin.UUCP (10/01/85)
I've been a user of Gosling's/Unipress Emacs for several years now, but
I've recently found myself pondering if I should switch to GNU Emacs.
Some of the arguments I've seen for GNU Emacs (in no particular order):
"It's free." -- That's a good point, but we've already got most
everything in sight licensed for Unipress Emacs.
"It has a real Lisp (cons and all)." -- To tell the truth, I'm
not too wild about Lisp. Sure, Unipress Emacs has only Mock Lisp,
but I've developed a unique solution for this particular problem
and I consider this advantage of GNU Emacs over vanilla Unipress
Emacs to be non-relevant (for my purposes).
"It's bound to be popular." -- There's no denying this, but what
advantage does this present?
I guess it could be argued that the set of programmable-editing
primitives in GNU Emacs is better than that of Unipress Emacs, but
from what I've seen, the GNU function set doesn't represent a "leap"
with respect to what's in Unipress Emacs or for that matter, CCA
Emacs.
Note that I'm not interested in getting flamage started, I'm just honestly
debating whether a switch to GNU Emacs would be worthwhile or if I'm just
attracted to it because it's new and seems to meet the needs of many people.
Are there other reasons to switch to GNU Emacs? If it's just the above,
I think I've talked myself into sticking with Unipress for a while longer.
Bill Mitchell
whm%arizona@csnet-relay
{ihnp4,noao,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whmking@kestrel.ARPA (10/14/85)
I'm posting this publicly because my site can't send to bocklin.UUCP for some reason. To: whm@bocklin@udel-relay Subject: how to simulate CONS reasonably "It has a real Lisp (cons and all)." -- To tell the truth, I'm not too wild about Lisp. Sure, Unipress Emacs has only Mock Lisp, but I've developed a unique solution for this particular problem and I consider this advantage of GNU Emacs over vanilla Unipress Emacs to be non-relevant (for my purposes). Do you have a reasonable solution? When we were running mucklisp I did it by using magic character strings - it turned out to be extremely slow. I'd be interested in hearing your solution. An advantage of GNUmacs is that it has version control in release 16-60. This means that a user-controllable number of old versions of the file are kept, rather than just one. The cons advantage is non-negligible. I tried to write a version control package for unipress emacs and gave up after I had given it a moderate amount of effort. I then took a no-version-control screw while running GNU emacs, so I said to myself "alright, not having VC cost me three hours, so I'll spend three hours building a version control." No problem - I had enough time left over to make it pretty, and sent it in to RMS. This incident demonstrates three advantages of GNUmacs: 1> it now has VC. Unipress emacs has had it on their wish list since 12/84 (I asked for it to be put there). 2> When you want to change system behavior, you can. 3> You've got a community working for you. -dick PS: when we got our copy we made both available to the user community and counted the uses. After a week nobody used Unipress emacs. We removed that option. Nobody complained. "None of this represents the opinion of anybody but myself."