Could Emacs be rewritten in Python?

[Patrick K. O'Brien]

martin at v.loewis.de (Martin v. Löwis) writes:

> pobrien at orbtech.com (Patrick K. O'Brien) writes:
> 
> > If you were crazy enough to think that you could create a program
> > along the lines of Emacs, but written in Python, how would you go
> > about it?  How would you design the domain model for files, buffers,
> > windows, and frames?  How would you allow the same level of
> > customizability?  How would you map functions (or methods or whatever)
> > to keys?  Any thoughts?
> 
> This problem is underspecified, atleast for the actual implementation
> strategy that follows: Do you need to support both terminal and GUI
> mode? Multiple GUI libraries? Do you need API compatibility with Emacs?

I only want to support the wxPython GUI and use Scintilla.  But I want
to wrap Scintilla so that no matter what methods Scintilla provides
the primitives used to customize PyAlaMode look like Emacs:

  forward_char
  forward_line
  forward_paragraph
  ...

I want the API and behavior to be similar enough to Emacs that an
elisp programmer would feel comfortable with the PyAlaMode API.  But I
also want Python programmers to be comfortable with it as well.  So
strict compatibility with Emacs is not the goal, simply close enough
to benefit from the lessons learned by Emacs and to attract Emacs
users and developers to PyAlaMode.

-- 
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech      http://www.orbtech.com/web/pobrien
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