Gosling Emacs

Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code,{{citation

| url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=806463

| publisher=Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Text Manipulation

| title=A Redisplay Algorithm

| first=James

| last=Gosling

| journal=ACM SIGPLAN Notices

| date=June 1981| volume=16

| issue=6

| pages=123–129

| doi=10.1145/872730.806463

| url-access=subscription

}} which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art,{{cite web |url=https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/emacs/skull-and-crossbones.txt |title=Ultra-hot screen management package |author= |date=n.d. |website= |publisher= |access-date=February 12, 2022}} warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not.{{citation

| url = http://features.slashdot.org/story/13/01/06/163248/richard-stallman-answers-your-questions

| title = Richard Stallman Answers Your Questions

| first = Richard

| last = Stallman

| author-link = Richard M. Stallman

| editor = samzenpus

| publisher = Slashdot

| date = 7 January 2013

| quote = The last piece of Gosmacs code that I replaced was the serial terminal scrolling optimizer, a few pages of Gosling's code which was proceeded by a comment with a skull and crossbones, meaning that it was so hard to understand that it was poison. I had to replace it, but worried that the job would be hard. I found a simpler algorithm and got it to work in a few hours, producing code that was shorter, faster, clearer, and more extensible. Then I made it use the terminal commands to insert or delete multiple lines as a single operation, which made screen updating far more efficient.}}

Since Gosling had permitted its unrestricted redistribution, Richard Stallman used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of GNU Emacs.{{cite book |title=Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property |author1=Christopher Kelty |author2=Mario Biagioli |author3=Peter Jaszi |author4=Martha Woodmansee |year=2015 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |isbn=9780226172491 |quote=...Stallman was using code from Gosling, based on permission that Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling that he had commercialized without telling Labalme.}}{{Citation|title=Oral History of James Gosling, part 1 of 2|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6XHroNewc |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211211/TJ6XHroNewc| archive-date=2021-12-11 |url-status=live|language=en|access-date=2019-10-14}}{{cbignore}} Among other things, he rewrote part of the Gosling code headed by the skull-and-crossbones comment and made it "...shorter, faster, clearer and more extensible."

In 1983 UniPress began selling Gosling Emacs on Unix for $395 and on VMS for $2,500, marketing it as "EMACS–multi-window text editor (Gosling version)".{{cite news | url=https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1983-12/1983_12_BYTE_08-12_Easy_Software#page/n335/mode/2up/search/unipress+emacs | title=Unix Spoken Here / and MS-DOS, and VMS too! | work=BYTE | date=Dec 1983 | access-date=8 March 2016 | pages=334 | type=advertisement}}

Controversially, Unipress asked Stallman to stop distributing his version of Emacs for Unix.{{cite book|chapter=7. A Stark Moral Choice|chapter-url=https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch07.html|title=Free as in freedom|isbn=0-596-00287-4|author=Sam Williams|year=2002|publisher="O'Reilly Media, Inc." |quote=According to the developer, Gosling, while a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, had assured early collaborators that their work would remain accessible. When UniPress caught wind of Stallman's project, however, the company threatened to enforce the copyright...In the course of reverse-engineering Gosling's interpreter, Stallman would create a fully functional Lisp interpreter, rendering the need for Gosling's original interpreter moot. |url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/freeasinfreedomr00will}}

UniPress never took legal action against Stallman or his nascent Free Software Foundation,{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}} believing "hobbyists and academics could never produce an Emacs that could compete" with their product.{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}} All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56 (July 1985),{{cite web|url=https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html|title=Emacs timeline|author=Jamie Zawinski|date=8 March 1999}} with the possible exception of a few particularly involved sections of the display code.{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}} The latest versions of GNU Emacs (since August 2004) do not feature the skull-and-crossbones warning.{{Citation needed|date=May 2011}}

Its extension language, Mocklisp, has a syntax that appears similar to Lisp, but Mocklisp does not have lists, only strings and arrays. The Mocklisp interpreter, built by Gosling and a collaborator, was replaced by a full Lisp interpreter in GNU Emacs.

{{Reflist}}

• Christopher Kelty, "EMACS, grep, and UNIX: authorship, invention and translation in software", https://web.archive.org/web/20110728022656/http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/~ashawley/gnu/emacs/ConText-Kelty.pdf

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Category:Emacs

Category:Unix text editors

Category:1981 software