Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-lisp--1855f6-Well, people wanted to extend/en

Well, people wanted to extend this language with programming facilities, so they added some. For instance, one of the first was a looping construct, which was &lt; &gt;. You would put those around things and it would loop. There were other cryptic commands that could be used to conditionally exit the loop. To make Emacs, we (1) added facilities to have subroutines with names. Before that, it was sort of like Basic, and the subroutines could only have single letters as their names. That was hard to program big programs with, so we added code so they could have longer names. Actually, there were some rather sophisticated facilities; I think that Lisp got its unwind-protect facility from TECO.