Z:gnu-www-ja-rms-lisp--3fd4c8-At that time I was working on/en

At that time I was working on the GNU system (a free software Unix-like operating system that many people erroneously call &ldquo;Linux&rdquo;). There was no free software Emacs editor that ran on Unix. I did, however, have a friend who had participated in developing Gosling's Emacs. Gosling had given him, by email, permission to distribute his own version. He proposed to me that I use that version. Then I discovered that Gosling's Emacs did not have a real Lisp. It had a programming language that was known as &lsquo;mocklisp&rsquo;, which looks syntactically like Lisp, but didn't have the data structures of Lisp. So programs were not data, and vital elements of Lisp were missing. Its data structures were strings, numbers and a few other specialized things.