Why Emacs has buffers

Re:Why Emacs has buffers by morelisp on Tuesday June 07, 2022 @07:08AM (#31652423)

> Emacs buffers are not the reason why functions like forward-paragraph exists.

A buffer is essentially a tuple

    (contents, point, mark, definition of a "paragraph", ...)

So the article is correct - without buffers 0-ary (or implicitly 1-ary, since all evaluation is in the context of a buffer) functions like `forward-paragraph` could not exist. And without a wide library of such functions, the correspondence between normal editing commands and idiomatic Emacs Lisp wouldn't exist, and most benefits of Emacs would be lost.

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Re:Why Emacs has buffers by singaporecode on Tuesday June 07, 2022 @09:19PM (#31662142)

I think of it more as dynamic extent but don’t want to be splitting hairs.

Not that I don’t love how Emacs does it, but I just think it’s not that closely correlated to the notion of what is a buffer as the header of the article implied

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Re:Why Emacs has buffers by camtarn on Tuesday June 07, 2022 @02:28PM (#31658287)

Thank you! This single comment explained why Emacs had buffers much more concisely than the article did (although I still liked the article).

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