EINE and ZWEI are two discontinued

Emacs Emacs , originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor MACroS"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

-like

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be us ...

s developed by

Daniel Weinreb Daniel L. Weinreb (January 6, 1959 – September 7, 2012) was an American computer scientist and programmer, with significant work in the environment of the programming language Lisp. Early life Weinreb was born on January 6, 1959, in Brookl ...

and Mike McMahon for

Lisp machines Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, the ...

in the 1970s and 1980s.

History

EINE was a

developed in the late 1970s. In terms of features, its goal was to "do what Stallman's PDP-10 (original) Emacs does". It was an early example of what would become many Emacs-like text editors. Unlike the original TECO-based Emacs, but like

Multics Emacs Multics Emacs is an early implementation of the Emacs text editor. It was written in Maclisp by Bernard Greenberg at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab in 1978, as a successor to the original 1976 TECO implementation of Emacs and a ...

, EINE was written in Lisp. It used

Lisp Machine Lisp Lisp Machine Lisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. A direct descendant of Maclisp, it was initially developed in the mid to late 1970s as the system programming language for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M ...

. Stallman later wrote

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship project of ...

, which was written in C and

Emacs Lisp 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 Ema ...

and extensible in Emacs Lisp. EINE also made use of the window system of the Lisp machine and was the first Emacs to have a graphical user interface. In the 1980s, EINE was developed into ZWEI. Innovations included programmability in Lisp Machine Lisp, and a new and more flexible

doubly linked list In computer science, a doubly linked list is a linked data structure that consists of a set of sequentially linked record (computer science), records called node (computer science), nodes. Each node contains three field (computer science), fields: ...

method of internally representing buffers. ZWEI would eventually become the editor library used for

Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

Zmacs Zmacs is one of the many variants of the Emacs text editor. Zmacs was written for the MIT Lisp machine and runs on its descendants (Symbolics Genera, LMI Lambda, TI Explorer). Zmacs is written in Lisp Machine Lisp (called ZetaLisp on Symbolic ...

(Emacs-like editor), Zmail (mail client), and Converse (message client), which were integrated into the Genera operating system which Symbolics developed for their Lisp machines.

Naming

EINE is a

recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hof ...

for "EINE Is Not Emacs", coined in August 1977.Electronic message to BUG-LISPM, Daniel Weinreb, 8 August 1977 It was a play on Ted Anderson's TINT, "TINT is not TECO". Anderson would later retort with "SINE is not EINE". ZWEI follows this pattern as an acronym for "ZWEI Was Eine Initially". With "zwei" being the German word for "two", "EINE" could be (re-)interpreted as being a reference to the German word for "one" (in the feminine adjectival form, as in "''eine Implementierung''", "one implementation").

References

External links

Entry
at th
Emacs Wiki
Emacs Text editors {{text-editor-stub

History

Naming

Further reading

References

External links