Emacs and Dalek: Difference between pages
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The '''Daleks''' are a race of [[cyborg]]s from the [[British]] [[television]] series [[Doctor Who]]. They are the mutated remains of the Kaled people of the planet Skaro, who travel around in robotic bodies which bear a suspicious resemblance to overgrown pepper shakers. Their catchphrase was "EXTERMINATE!" |
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'''Emacs''' is an extremely versatile [[text editor]] that is popular with programmers. It was originally written by [[Richard Stallman]] in [[1976]], as a set of '''E'''ditor '''MAC'''ro'''S''' for the text editor [[TECO|Teco]]. |
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The Daleks were first introduced in December [[1963]] in an episode of Doctor Who called variously, "The Daleks", "The Dead Planet" or "The Mutants". They immediately became a hit, and were featured in many subsequent episodes. Two movies spun off from Doctor Who featured them as the main villians, including "Doctor Who and the Daleks", and "Dalek Invasion of Earth". In addition to this, their popularity has extended to books and stage shows. |
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Since its original incarnation, Emacs has been re-implemented multiple times. The two most popular versions nowadays are GNU Emacs (also written by Stallman) and its close relative [[XEmacs]]. Strictly speaking, the lower-case word ''emacs'' (plural ''emacsen'') refers to the class of editors that use roughly the same key bindings as GNU Emacs; the capitalized word ''Emacs'' is often synonymous with GNU Emacs. |
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Over the twenty-six seasons of the series, the Daleks underwent a number of revisions and elaborations. In the definitive episode "Genesis of the Daleks," aired in [[1975]], the creator of the Daleks was revealed to be the Kaled chief scientist [[Davros]]. Although Davros appeared to have been killed by his own creations at the end of the episode, he survived their attack in suspended animation and was later recovered from the ruins of Skaro by the Daleks seeking his help to enhance their design. Davros' continuing influence eventually led to a schism among the Daleks, with one faction following Davros' leadership (the "Renegade" Daleks) and another faction rejecting their creator to instead follow the Supreme Dalek (the "Imperial" Daleks). |
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=== Emacs History === |
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Davros made his last appearance in the Doctor Who TV serial "''Remembrance of the Daleks''" simply as a head. |
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Emacs began at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at [[MIT]]. Beginning in [[1974]], staff [[hacker]] [[Richard Stallman]] added display-editing capability to [[TECO]], the text editor on the AI Lab's Incompatible Timesharing System ([[ITS]].) "Display-editing" meant that the screen display was updated as the user entered new commands; compare the behavior of [[ed]]. |
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The users at the AI Lab Large accumulated a collection of custom [[macro|macros]], TECO programs that could be launched from within the display editing mode. In [[1976]], Stallman wrote the first Emacs ("Editor MACroS"), which organized these macros into a single command set and added facilities for extension and self-documentation. It soon became the standard editor on ITS. |
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They were created by Doctor Who author [[Terry Nation]]. |
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Several Emacs-like editors were written in the following years, such EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS) and ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially), written by Daniel Weinreb and Mike McMahon. |
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Multics Emacs was written in [[1978]] by [[Bernard Greenberg]] at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab. The editor was written in [[MacLisp]], a dialect of the [[LISP programming language]]. User-supplied extensions were also written in Lisp. The choice of Lisp provided more extensibility than ever before, and has been followed by most subsequent Emacs implementations. |
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Gosling Emacs was written by [[James Gosling]] in [[1981]]. It was the first Emacs to run on [[Unix]], and was written in [[C programming language|C]] with [[Mocklisp]] as an extension language. |
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In [[1984]], Stallman began a new implementation of Emacs, GNU Emacs, which became the first program in the nascent [[GNU|GNU project]]. GNU Emacs was written in C and used [[Emacs Lisp]] for extension. The first widely distributed version of GNU Emacs was 15.34, which appeared in [[1985]]. Like Gosling Emacs, GNU Emacs ran on Unix, but it had more features and a more advanced extension language. It soon replaced Gosling Emacs as the ''de facto'' Emacs editor on Unix. |
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Beginning in [[1991]], Lucid Emacs was developed by [[Jamie Zawinski]] and others at Lucid Inc., based on an early alpha version of GNU Emacs 19. The codebases soon diverged, and the separate development teams gave up the attempt to merge them back into a single program. This was one of the most famous early [[software fork|forks]] of a [[free software]] program. Lucid Emacs has since been renamed [[XEmacs]]; it and GNU Emacs remain the two most popular emacsen in use today. |
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=== Description of GNU Emacs === |
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==== Architecture ==== |
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The GNU Emacs manual describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor." The low-level [[source code]] is written in the [[C programming language]]. This includes the display engine, and an interpreter for [[Emacs Lisp]] (a dialect of the [[LISP programming language]].) The majority of the editing code is written in Emacs Lisp. At run-time, the interpreter loads and evaluates (executes) this Lisp code. |
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The user can ''extend'' and ''customize'' the Lisp code from within Emacs itself. Emacs provides extensive facilities to support this, including commands for looking up the documentation of loaded functions and variables (this is known as ''self-documentation''.) By re-evaluating the user-supplied Lisp code, the behavior of Emacs can be modified "on the fly", without having to recompile or even restart the editor. Lisp is a good choice of language for this purpose, because it allows functions to be treated as data. |
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As a result, it is very easy to add custom functionality to Emacs. Emacs includes many standard extensions, such as Emacs-W3, a [[web browser]]; Gnus, a tool for reading [[e-mail]] and [[Usenet]] discussions; an implementation of the game [[Tetris]]; and Doctor, an implementation of [[ELIZA]] that performs basic Rogerian [[psychotherapy]]. In addition, Emacs can serve as an [[Integrated Development Environment|IDE]], allowing programmers to edit, compile, and debug their code from within a single interface. |
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The downside to Emacs' design is a performance overhead from loading and interpreting the Lisp code. Two joke acronyms for EMACS are ''Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping'', and ''Emacs Makes A Computer Slow''. Modern computers generally have enough memory and processor power, compared to the systems on which Emacs was first implemented, that this issue is largely moot. Nevertheless, this is a frequent point raised by Emacs' detractors during [[editor wars]]. |
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Emacs is an example of a ''buffer gap editor'': the contents of a document are stored in a data structure, which consists of a single buffer with a gap where the current edit point resides. With this design, editing operations such as adding or deleting a few characters do not have to modify much memory, and operations such as searching are relatively simple. The competing form of storage for documents is to store each line of the document in a small buffer. |
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==== Distribution ==== |
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Emacs is [[free software]], distributed under the terms of the [[GNU General Public License|GNU GPL]]. |
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The source code and binaries are available via [[FTP]] from the GNU project website (below.) They are also widely available from other sites on the [[Internet]]. Vendors of [[UNIX|Unices]] (both free and proprietary) frequently provide Emacs bundled in the [[operating system]]. |
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Emacs runs on a large number of platforms, including [[GNU/Linux]] and most [[UNIX|Unices]], [[Mac OS]], and [[Microsoft Windows]]. |
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==== Development ==== |
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Emacs is part of the [[GNU|GNU project]], and under active development. Several, but not all, of the developers are affiliated with the [[Free Software Foundation]] (FSF). |
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Until the release of Emacs 21.1, Emacs development was relatively closed. The project has since adopted a public development mailing list and anonymous [[Concurrent Versions System|CVS]] access. |
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However, it remains Emacs policy to accept significant code contributions only if the contributing author assigns the [[copyright]] for the code to the FSF. (This does not apply to bug reports or minor code contributions.) This policy is intended to facilitate [[copyleft]] enforcement. |
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The latest release of GNU Emacs is version 21.1, released on [[October 20]], [[2001]]. Development takes place in a single CVS trunk, which is at version 21.2.50. The current maintainer is [[Richard Stallman]]. |
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'''External Links''' |
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*http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html -- The GNU Emacs homepage |
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*http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html -- A paper on the design of the original Emacs, by R. Stallman |
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*http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html -- "Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementation" by B. Greenberg |
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*http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html -- "Emacs Timeline" by J. Zawinski |
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*http://www.finseth.com/~fin/emacs.html -- "List of Emacs implementations" by C. Finseth |
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Revision as of 06:19, 29 January 2002
The Daleks are a race of cyborgs from the British television series Doctor Who. They are the mutated remains of the Kaled people of the planet Skaro, who travel around in robotic bodies which bear a suspicious resemblance to overgrown pepper shakers. Their catchphrase was "EXTERMINATE!"
The Daleks were first introduced in December 1963 in an episode of Doctor Who called variously, "The Daleks", "The Dead Planet" or "The Mutants". They immediately became a hit, and were featured in many subsequent episodes. Two movies spun off from Doctor Who featured them as the main villians, including "Doctor Who and the Daleks", and "Dalek Invasion of Earth". In addition to this, their popularity has extended to books and stage shows.
Over the twenty-six seasons of the series, the Daleks underwent a number of revisions and elaborations. In the definitive episode "Genesis of the Daleks," aired in 1975, the creator of the Daleks was revealed to be the Kaled chief scientist Davros. Although Davros appeared to have been killed by his own creations at the end of the episode, he survived their attack in suspended animation and was later recovered from the ruins of Skaro by the Daleks seeking his help to enhance their design. Davros' continuing influence eventually led to a schism among the Daleks, with one faction following Davros' leadership (the "Renegade" Daleks) and another faction rejecting their creator to instead follow the Supreme Dalek (the "Imperial" Daleks).
Davros made his last appearance in the Doctor Who TV serial "Remembrance of the Daleks" simply as a head.
They were created by Doctor Who author Terry Nation.