Thursday, February 23, 2006
Emacs LISP for scripting
I discovered today that you can use GNU Emacs as a scripting engine in it's own right, i.e. you can begin and ELISP file with:
#!/usr/bin/emacs --script
This isn't that big a deal. I've known about the --batch switch for an age, but it signals a level of intent which caused me to search further and find out that you can pass custom command line arguments into such scripts (as you would with more traditional scripting languages).
Now ELISP isn't the nicest LISP variant out there, but in the domain of text processing it is unparalleled and it has the best IDE I've ever used (developing ELISP in Emacs is a joy!). Every time I think Emacs has run out of surprises it pulls another rabbit out of the hat. I can see a whole set of problems that fall into the category of "too hairy for bash, to long winded in python" where Emacs could be doing the heavy lifting.
#!/usr/bin/emacs --script
This isn't that big a deal. I've known about the --batch switch for an age, but it signals a level of intent which caused me to search further and find out that you can pass custom command line arguments into such scripts (as you would with more traditional scripting languages).
Now ELISP isn't the nicest LISP variant out there, but in the domain of text processing it is unparalleled and it has the best IDE I've ever used (developing ELISP in Emacs is a joy!). Every time I think Emacs has run out of surprises it pulls another rabbit out of the hat. I can see a whole set of problems that fall into the category of "too hairy for bash, to long winded in python" where Emacs could be doing the heavy lifting.
