Gosling Emacs

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Gosling Emacs (often shortened to "Gosmacs" or "gmacs") was an Emacs implementation written in 1981 by James Gosling in C. It was the first Emacs to run under Unix. Its extension language, Mocklisp, has a syntax that appears similar to Lisp, but Mocklisp has no lists or other structured datatypes. Gosling initially allowed Gosling Emacs to be redistributed with no formal restrictions, but later sold it to UniPress. Gosling Emacs was especially notable for its efficient redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull and crossbones in ASCII art, warning would-be improvers that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not.