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ost of the GNU Emacs text editor is written in the
programming language
called Emacs Lisp. You can write new code in Emacs Lisp and install it as
an extension to the editor. However, Emacs Lisp is more than a mere
"extension language"; it is a full computer programming language in its
own right. You can use it as you would any other programming language.
Because Emacs Lisp is designed for use in an editor, it has special
features for scanning and parsing text as well as features for handling
files, buffers, displays, subprocesses, and so on. Emacs Lisp is closely
integrated with the editing facilities; thus, editing commands are
functions that can also conveniently be called from Lisp programs, and
parameters for customization are ordinary Lisp variables.
(from the GNU Emacs Reference Manual, version 2.1)
