Could Emacs be rewritten in Python?

Mon Apr 7 23:23:59 EDT 2003

Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> Emacs has quite a lot of modes that are not about editing flat text at
> all (dired, buffer-list, custom, rmail's inbox, speedbar, etc.).
> They could well benefit from an being able to manipulate other
> structures.   To be able to use page-up/down and any other bindings
> that are not overriden, any such structure will need to provide view
> of itself in simpler terms, all down to flat text...

Now *that's* an interesting idea! We would have, not a text
editor, but a general hierarchical structure editor. Editing
plain text would just be a special case, when we're editing
an object of type "string".

This would solve a number of problems at once. Syntax
dependent editing is done by parsing the source into
a tree of objects that know how to display and edit
themselves. Embedding of "foreign" editing modes is done
simply by inserting an object of the appropriate type into
the tree. Want an reSt comment in your Python code? Just hit
M-x insert_py_rest_docstring and off you go!

The more I think about this, the more it seems like a
REALLY REALLY interesting idea...

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg