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"The original Emacs did not have Lisp in it. The lower level language, the non-interpreted language — was PDP-10 Assembler. The interpreter we wrote in that actually wasn't written for Emacs, it was written for TECO. It was our text editor, and was an extremely ugly programming language, as ugly as could possibly be. The reason was that it wasn't designed to be a programming language, it was designed to be an editor and command language. There were commands like ‘5l’, meaning ‘move five lines’, or ‘i’ and then a string and then an ESC to insert that string. You would type a string that was a series of commands, which was called a command string. You would end it with ESC ESC, and it would get executed."

Funny this makes it sound like the emacs predecessor was closer to vim in editing style then modern emacs




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