[HECnet] VT-62?

Erik Olofsen e.olofsen at xs4all.nl
Thu Oct 3 08:48:27 PDT 2013


One more note on Emacs and alternatives...

Emacs 19.28 compiled on my Alpha with VMS 6.1. On my VAX I only have
gcc 2.8.1, and after lots of trouble and batch time, I gave up.
Having lost SOS and EDT fluency, I had a look at JED. Interestingly,
recent sources compile both on the old VAX as well as on CHIMPY.
JED's author still keeps the VMS dependencies in the distribution,
but untested only.

Erik

On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 12:09:38AM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-10-02 23:59, Clem Cole wrote:

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com
<mailto:mcguire at neurotica.com>> wrote:

      Emacs builds on most everything, and is packaged for most (all?) Linux
      distributions.


Dave -- might want to tighten comment that a little.   GNU-emacs builds
on most anything with a 32 bit linear address space or greater.   Other
emacs implementations YMMV.

In addition, a port of Emacs is actually not that trivial.
Anyone familiar with TOPS-20 (or OS/8, or probably some other of DEC 
OSes) will probably recognize what I'm going to write next.

Emacs "knows" how an executable looks like, and how the memory layout is 
of the running program, and how dynamic libraries work, and so on. 
Because, as a part of building emacs, emacs will start bare bone, read 
in all kind of initial lisp packages, compile stuff, and create a 
finalized emacs in memory that is running with all the bit and pieces of 
initialization code already run. At that point, emacs will do a memory 
dump to disk, and munge that file to be an executable. And that is the 
actual emacs binary.

For any new system, and especially for any new binary image format, 
emacs needs to be taught all about it.


But anyway, if the scope would be "emacs" and not "GNU emacs", then 
implementations exists for just about everything. I've written a small 
emacs-clone in TECO-8, there exists multiple Emacs clones for MS-DOS 
(maybe the best known is Epsilon). Stacken (the computer club at the 
Royal Institute of Technology) wrote an emacs clone called AMIS, which 
ran on VMS way back, as well as on Tops-10, RSTS/E, Norsk Data machines, 
and god knows what else.

There is MicroEMACS, which is really easy to port around (I have it 
running on RSX).

2BSD have JOVE.

I'm sure people can easily come up with other implementations...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                    ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol



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