--- In bangalore-lisp@yahoogroups.com, alephnull@... wrote:
>
> On 19 Sep 2007, tomelam@... wrote:
>
> > I already felt that the string & structured-data processing that
> > Lisp can do so well
>
> Keeping in mind that elisp is more procedural than functional,
> Finseth's seminal work [1] on text editing is quite enlightening.
>
> Footnotes:
> [1] http://www.finseth.com/craft/
>
> --
> Alok
>
> We have nowhere else to go... this is all we have.
> -- Margaret Mead
>

Alok,

Thanks for the reference. I'll definitely have a look at it. Did you
read `The Emacs Problem'? I wouldn't say it's really just about
Emacs, but rather about how XML is evolving towards a hideous sort of
Turing completeness and what we really want for hierarchical-data
processing is `code is data and data is code' within the framework of
a great editor with great regex and text processing -- and the
problems getting to that nirvana. At least that's my reading of it.

I'm not sure what you mean `elisp is more procedural than functional',
by the way. Is it hard to write functional code in elisp? If so,
why? Care to elucidate?