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#interlisp#sedit#structureeditor

Lisp Editing in the 80s - Interlisp SEdit

thoughtupquick

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

9K views9 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureProgramming languagesLisp and ClojureHistory of computingVim, Emacs and editors

A demonstration of SEdit, the structural editor for Interlisp-D on Xerox Lisp machines, which edits code as trees instead of text.

Reuploaded from: people.csail.mit.edu/riastradh/InterlispSEdit.mov.bz2 Thanks to "lispm" on reddit for all the info: reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/6iq2u8/how_was_lisp_edited_in_the… From what I understand SEdit was developed later than DEdit. SEdit is documented first in the 1987 Lyric release of Interlisp-D, see Appendix B: bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/interlisp-d/198706_Lyr… SEdit is expanded in the virtual machine version of Interlisp-D, called Medley. See the Medley 1.0 release notes, appendix B: bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/interlisp-d/198809_Med… Some hints for using SEdit bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/xerox/interlisp-d/hotline/04… If you want to try it out, maybe this contains the editors: www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/medley/

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a fascinating historical demonstration of true structural code editing on 1980s Lisp machines.

undershirton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Interlisp project: Restore Interlisp-D to usability on modern OSes”

I missed the golden age of lisp, but i know this project for its legendary structural editor, SEdit1, released the year I was born. i found it mentioned in an old paredit readme, something poignant like “paredit is only a shadow of what interlisp was: true structural editing”. 1: link to this video
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mikelevinson Hacker News • Recommends

On “On Repl-Driven Programming”

…e some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread. I can add a few more: Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl: link Brian Mastenbrook demonstrating Interlisp's SEDIT structure editor in the Xerox Lisp environment: link to this video Rainer Joswig (lispm here on HN) showing us a little bit of repl and Zmacs interaction on a Symbolics Lisp Machine: link Rainer again, showing some simple interactions with Macintosh Common Lisp, which was my daily driver for years: link Ruby programmer Avdi Grimm shows some things that he found cool about Pharo Smalltalk: link Dan In…
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lispmon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Show HN: Bel”

…d source code transformation phase (macro expansion). We load a bunch of macros into Lisp and they then are available incrementally. There are syntax-based structure editors (for example they were in Interlisp-D), but they always have limits, since macros can do arbitrary source transformations on s-expressions and those are not based on grammars. link to this video You are really looking for a very different language experience. Lisp with s-expressions works very different from what you propose. That's why I say: it's not about dropping parentheses, you propose to get rid of some of the core parts of Lisp (how programs are represented, parsed, etc.) and give it a different user interface. That's fine,…
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