Emacs Lisp

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Emacs Lisp is a version of Lisp provided as the scripting language for the powerful Emacs text editor. Many of Emacs' functions are written in this language, and one can write almost anything in this language -- it's that powerful. But then, given that this text editor includes a web browser, news reader, email reader, and even games (to name a few), it's only fitting that the language be sufficiently ambitious.

Emacs Lisp has a huge library of functions, including many relating to text-editing itself, which allow the programmer to leverage it to accomplish some impressive tasks. The best approach is to use Emacs Lisp as a way of customizing Emacs into turning into an interface for the program desired. Of course, one can use Emacs Lisp to simply automate common Lisp tasks as well.

One of Emacs Lisp's greatest flaws is dynamic scoping. Objects declared within the scope of a function can be visible to outside functions. This can wreak havoc with larger projects.


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