Warp wrote:
>   Nothing more fake than claiming a language is about as fast as C, when
> in fact it's *compiled as C*, in the first place.

Nah. Being a high-level language that compiles down to C that's as fast as 
one might have written manually in C is pretty impressive.

Being *slower* than "native" C while compiling down to C is easy. Being as 
fast as C when compiling down to C is tough. Being faster than C is (I'd 
say) impossible if you actually have C as an intermediate language.

Otherwise, SQL is nothing more than fancy assembly language.

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   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Warp wrote:
>   So in your opinion people who have been using emacs in a unix system
> for 20 years have no right to use the same software in the exact same
> way in Windows?

My favorite is how emacs brings up the help screen when you hit backspace. 
I'm pretty sure the defined meaning of backspace predates emacs. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Darren New escreveu:
> Being *slower* than "native" C while compiling down to C is easy. Being 
> as fast as C when compiling down to C is tough. Being faster than C is 
> (I'd say) impossible if you actually have C as an intermediate language.

Look up Stalin Scheme.  A heavily agressive optimizing compiler for 
Scheme that quite a few times generates C code that beats hand written C 
code.  If you look at the C source it outputs, you'll be shocked by how 
badly it treats C as truly portable assembly.  Lots of structs and loop 
unrolls.  Worthy of the name.

It is very slow to compile as it's a whole program compiler performing 
many analyses and type inferencing.  It's meant as the very last step in 
the development cycle, after all iterative developing, testing and bug 
fixing was done and is ready to go production.  Think about that, truly 
being able to program in a confortable language without ever thinking on 
how to make the compiler happy and getting top-notch fast code without 
any tweaks...

OTOH, it doesn't support such niceties of Scheme such as a full-numeric 
tower, full-continuations or define-syntax.

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Darren New escreveu:
> My favorite is how emacs brings up the help screen when you hit 
> backspace. I'm pretty sure the defined meaning of backspace predates 
> emacs. :-)

I may be a little rusty at emacs but I don't really remember that.

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nemesis wrote:
> Look up Stalin Scheme.  A heavily agressive optimizing compiler for 
> Scheme that quite a few times generates C code that beats hand written C 
> code.  If you look at the C source it outputs, you'll be shocked by how 
> badly it treats C as truly portable assembly.  Lots of structs and loop 
> unrolls.  Worthy of the name.

Sure. It generates code you wouldn't dream of spending the time to generate 
by hand. But it's still not going to be faster than the best C that can be 
written for that platform.   (That's kind of a "duh, no kidding" statement, 
sure.)

Contrast with something that generates machine code natively, which might 
output code that your C compiler would never output, for example.

If your front-end outputs C, you're never going to out-perform the C code it 
generates. If your C compiler can't take advantage of the GPU to do math or 
can't hook into interrupt vectors directly or ..., then your language isn't 
going to do better.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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nemesis wrote:
> Darren New escreveu:
>> My favorite is how emacs brings up the help screen when you hit 
>> backspace. I'm pretty sure the defined meaning of backspace predates 
>> emacs. :-)
> 
> I may be a little rusty at emacs but I don't really remember that.

Backspace is C-h, yes? C-h is "help".  Gets me every time.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Mueen Nawaz wrote:
> 	As for kill and yank, do realize that Emacs is old. I'm not sure cut
> and paste was common editor parlance in those days.

Of course it was. "Cut and paste" is the term left over from before 
computers, remember? :-) It's how you composed a newspaper before digital 
ever existed.

I suspect it's more because there were way too many mnemonic keys needed.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Invisible wrote:
> By the way... what kind of keyboard actually has a Meta key?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard

A lot of the keyboards that had multiple character sets (like APL keyboards) 
had meta keys too.  Sun SPARCstations had meta keys.

Wasn't that uncommon before IBM keyboards took over.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> (I'm pretty sure I recall seeing shell scripts that generate edlin 
> scripts that do useful stuff. Notepad would be useless here.)

http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2007/01/using-vbscript-to-paste-text-into.html

Not that I'm seriously suggesting the technique, mind...

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   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Warp wrote:
>   If I need to edit a file remotely through SSH, emacs will do the job
> (regardless of which OS I'm using, because emacs will be running on the
> remote computer), notepad won't.

That's why they invented RDP and VNC.

Altho in this case, I usually prefer VI, because it's lower bandwidth and 
you can work effectively with very delayed feedback.

Maybe emacs is the same, but I find I can't easily drive emacs without 
feedback after most command keystrokes, while it's easy to (for example) 
find a string in vi without all the incremental stuff.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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