Subject: Re: Starting all over from 16.1 ?
From: [email-masked] (Jim Balter)

18 Feb 1997 15:26:52 -0800
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Original-To: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
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Ted Lemon wrote:
> 

> The Emacs conflict was that James Gosling wrote a version of Emacs for
> Unix and VMS, which was originally under a copyright that encouraged
> people to contribute changes and features.  The FSF based versions of
> GNU Emacs prior to 17 on this ``free'' version of Gosmacs, and made
> their own distribution, which was a lot closer to the old emacs from
> ITS Teco and Lisp Machine days.  Gosling later sold the copyright for
> his emacs to Unipress, who contacted the FSF and told them to cease
> and desist in using Gosmacs-based code.  So the FSF rewrote their
> emacs from scratch, with a real lisp interpreter instead of the crappy
> Gosmacs MockLisp interpreter.  That was GNU Emacs version 17.

This "history" is a fantasy.  Stallman rewrote emacs from scratch in
1985, before the advent of the FSF.  For a bit of non-fantasized
history, here's a quote from OOOONEWS, which is still part of the
distribution, and contains changelogs from version 1.1 to 1.15, which
was by that time called "Emacs 15" (dropping the 1. level of the three
level numbering happened at Emacs 13), and was followed by 16, 17, 18,
and currently 19.  None of the entries in OOOONEWS says "rewrote it from
scratch".

  Changes in Emacs 15
  [...]

  * It is now possible convert Mocklisp code (for Gosling Emacs) to Lisp
    code that can run in GNU Emacs.  M-x convert-mocklisp-buffer
    converts the contents of the current buffer from Mocklisp to GNU
    Emacs Lisp.  You should then save the converted buffer with C-x C-w
    under a name ending in ".el"

    There are probably some Mocklisp constructs that are not handled.
    If you encounter one, feel free to report the failure as a bug.  The
    construct will be handled in a future Emacs release, if that is not
    not too hard to do.

    Note that lisp code converted from Mocklisp code will not
    necessarily run as fast as code specifically written for GNU Emacs,
    nor will it use the many features of GNU Emacs which are not present
    in Gosling's emacs.  (In particular, the byte-compiler (m-x
    byte-compile-file) knows little about compilation of code directly
    converted from mocklisp.)  It is envisaged that old mocklisp code
    will be incrementally converted to GNU lisp code, with M-x
    convert-mocklisp-buffer being the first step in this process.

GNU emacs implemented elisp from the beginning; it never implemented
Mocklisp; the above was the extent of its support.  It was GNU emacs
from the beginning; it was never Gosling emacs.  The logs also note "A
document of the differences between GNU Emacs and Twenex Emacs now
exists"; that was 1.3.  Stallman invented the original twenex emacs in
TECO (a programmable line editor) back at MIT, and reinvented it in C as
GNU emacs after he left.  In between, Gosling wrote his C version.

> Anyway, this is all, of course, way the heck off topic.   But since
> people keep posting off-topic flames (sorry, Jim, I mean intellectual
> disagreements) about the GPL on this mailing list, I thought I'd
> contribute a little historical note to add interest...

It's too bad that you still confuse critical analysis and discussion
with flaming and fail to note that the title of this mailing list is
"gnu-win32", that the word "GNU" in there is important, that quite
a few people on this list care about these issues, and that employees of
the maintainer of the list have been active participants in the
discussion, your personal opinion of what is or is not on topic
notwithstanding.  But if you truly think that these things are off
topic, then it is certainly hypocritical to use them as justification
for posting something that you believe to be off topic, especially when
your "contribution" is fantasized or misremembered history.

--
<J Q B>
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