Emacs Lisp

Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by the GNU Emacs and XEmacs text editors. It is also used by other applications such as Gnus, Zmacs, and Gnusmail. Emacs Lisp was originally implemented by GNU Emacs author Richard Stallman in a Lisp system he wrote in the mid-1970s called "Stallman Lisp" or "S-Lisp". In 1981, Stallman published a paper describing S-Lisp in detail. In the same year, he released the first version of GNU Emacs, which included a Lisp interpreter. Today, Emacs Lisp is a full-fledged programming language with its own syntax and semantics. It is not a "scripting language" in the sense that it is not designed to be embedded in other applications; rather, it is a standalone language that can be used for writing programs of any size. Emacs Lisp is a dynamically typed, garbage-collected language. It has a Lisp-1 dialect with lexical scoping. It is also a homoiconic language, which means that code is represented as data structures that can be manipulated by the program itself. Emacs Lisp is an excellent choice for writing small utilities or one-off programs. It is also a good choice for writing larger programs, though it is not as widely used for this purpose as some other languages. There are two main implementations of Emacs Lisp: GNU Emacs Lisp and XEmacs Lisp. GNU Emacs Lisp is the official implementation of the language, while XEmacs Lisp is a fork of GNU Emacs Lisp with a few language changes and additions.