[ILUG] Bash and Lisp

[David Golden]

On Sunday 10 July 2005 16:36, Karl Carlile wrote:
> I have been studying emacs list. Can anyone explain the relationship
> beween between bash and lisp languages. 

Not a whole lot. They are both programming languages, and they
both feature an interactive prompt...

Lisp actually came into recognisable existence before almost everything 
else (except Fortran) in the late 1950s and has been evolving 
continuously since then, and so some features bash has may well have 
been pioneered in a lisp, of course.

> Do you think I am right for 
> using 3 emacs for bboth bash and elisps. 

As Niall has said, that sentence is a bit difficult to make much sense 
of, but elisp implies emacs.  It would be FAR stranger to be editing 
elisp in vim 8-).   

Both vim and emacs are quite adequate for editing bash scripts, though.

Emacs being emacs, you can also bring up a bash prompt within emacs with 
M-x shell on a typical linux distro emacs install, not to be confused 
with M-x eshell which is a somewhat bash-like shell written IN emacs 
lisp...

> Can you recommend any good 
> books or docs on emacs, basj and elisp.
> Karl

You are learning elisp specifically to do things to/with the emacs 
editor?  If you are  looking to learn lisp in general rather than 
elisp, there are the more modern general-purpose lispy dialects to be 
aware of, elisp is a bit quirky:  

 "Common Lisp" 	http://cliki.net/
"Scheme"		http://schemers.org/

Note they have somewhat different philosophies, which will be readily
apparent if you read their respective specifications.