Emacs Lisp

Emacs is a programmable editor whose underlying language is a variant of MockLisp called Emacs Lisp[#!elisp!#] (or elisp for short). Included in this system is a ``byte-compiler'' which preparses the code to a binary format. All of the elisp source files are stored in a single directory, with names ending in ``.el''. Byte-compilation of a source file is output to the same filename with the extension ``.elc''. When this source file would otherwise be loaded, the system automatically looks for a compiled version of it and will load that in the place of an original source file.

The byte-compiler's output is highly portable. This means that compiled elisp files can be placed on servers, side by side with the original source code, instead of requiring a separate set for each architecture.