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Ben Simon has a post up on his blog describing how he set up a scheme development environment on his Galaxy S9 Android phone. It was also an especially timely post as I had been eyeing a Mac Quadra with Read More

The post Someone installed a Scheme development environment on their phone appeared first on The Lone C++ Coder's Blog.

From the majestic Evolution of Emacs Lisp paper (if you haven't read it yet, you're missing out):

• 'lambda was not technically part of the Elisp language until around 1991 when it was added as a macro, early during the development of Emacs-19. In Emacs-18, anonymous functions were written as quoted values of the form:

    '(lambda (..ARGS..) ..BODY..)

  While the lambda macro has made this quote unnecessary for almost 30 years now, many instances of this practice still occur in Elisp code, even though it prevents byte-compilation of the body.'

• 'The old TECO version of Emacs also allowed attaching hooks to variable changes, but this feature was not provided in Elisp because Richard Stallman considered it a misfeature, which could make it difficult to debug the code. Yet this very feature was finally added to Elisp in 2018 in the form of variable watchers, though they are ironically mostly meant to be used as debugging aides.'

• 'Elisp does not optimize away tail calls. With Scheme being familiar to many Elisp developers, this is a disappointment for many. In 1991, Jamie Zawinski added an unbind all instruction to the Lucid Emacs byte-code engine (which appears in both Emacs and XEmacs to this day) that was intended to support tail-call optimization, but never implemented the optimization itself.'

• 'During the learly years of Emacs, the main complaints from users about the simple mark&sweep algorithm were the GC pauses. These were solved very simply in Emacs-19.31 by removing the messages that indicated when GC was in progress. Since then complaints about the performance of the GC have been rare.'

  'Richard Stallman refused to incorporate XEmacs's FFI into Emacs for fear that it would open up a backdoor with which developers would be able to legally circumvent the GNU General Public License (GPL) and thus link Emacs's own code with code that does not abide by these licensing terms.

  After many years of pressure on this issue (not just within the Emacs project, since this affected several other GNU projects, most notably GCC), a solution was agreed to, which was to implement an FFI that would only accept to load libraries that came with a special symbol attesting that this library is compatible with the GPL.

  As a result, after a very long wait, 2016 finally saw the release of Emacs-25.1 with an FFI comparable in functionality to that of XEmacs. So far, we do not know of any publicly available package which makes use of this new functionality, sadly.'