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Wednesday, February 6, 2008

The power of lists

You know the emacs kill ring? Well, I just had a look at it. considering the operations you can do with the kill ring, the data structure is simply a list!

In it's simplest form, working with plain text, it looks like

kill-ring is a variable defined in `simple.el'.
Its value is
("glgjglkg" "ggjjkg")


You get this by entering some text in a txt buffer and killing some lines of text. C-h v kill-ring will bring up the list.

Of course, for different modes it becomes a little more complex than that but essentially it's just a list.

In case you were wondering whether Emacs was using some difficult, arcane data structure. All the more reason for me to start learning Lisp sensibly. I've been starting, putting it off for quite some time now.

Should. start. it. some. time. soon.