Dialect of Lisp used as the primary implementation and extension language for Emacs
Emacs Lisp
Emacs logo
Paradigm
Functional, meta, reflective
Family
Lisp
Designed by
Richard Stallman, Guy L. Steele, Jr.
Developer
GNU Project
First appeared
1985; 39 years ago (1985)
Stable release
29.1
/ 30 July 2023; 9 months ago (2023-07-30)
Typing discipline
Dynamic, strong
Scope
Dynamic, optionally lexical
Platform
Emacs
OS
Cross-platform
License
GPLv3
Filename extensions
.el, .elc, .eln
Website
www.gnu.org/software/emacs
Influenced by
Common Lisp, Maclisp
Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language used as a scripting language by Emacs (a text editor family most commonly associated with GNU Emacs and XEmacs). It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in C, as is the Lisp interpreter. Emacs Lisp is also termed Elisp, although there are also older, unrelated Lisp dialects with that name.[1][2]
Users of Emacs commonly write Emacs Lisp code to customize and extend Emacs. Itself written in Emacs Lisp, Customize provides a set of preferences pages allowing the user to set options and preview their effect in the running Emacs session. When the user saves their changes, Customize simply writes the necessary Emacs Lisp code to the user's config file, which can be set to a special file that only Customize uses, to avoid the possibility of altering the user's own file.
Emacs Lisp can also function as a scripting language, much like the Unix Bourne shell or Perl, by calling Emacs in batch mode. In this way it may be called from the command line or via an executable file, and its editing functions, such as buffers and movement commands are available to the program just as in the normal mode. No user interface is presented when Emacs is started in batch mode; it simply executes the passed-in script and exits, displaying any output from the script.
^"HEDRICK at RUTGERS (Mngr DEC-20's/Dir LCSR Comp Facility" (1981-12-18). ""information about Common Lisp implementation"". Letter to "rpg at SU-AI, jonl at MIT-AI". Archived from the original on 2016-09-20. Retrieved 2019-07-28. We have some experience in Lisp implementation now, since Elisp (the extended implementation of Rutgers/UCI Lisp) is essentially finished.{{cite press release}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
^"Ad for CCA EMACS". Unix Review. December 1984. p. 16. CCA EMACS and Elisp are trademarks of CCA Uniworks, Inc.
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