Emacs Lisp is a dialect of the
Lisp programming language used by the
GNU Emacs and
XEmacs text editors (which this article will refer to collectively as "
Emacs"). It is used for implementing most of the editing functionality built into Emacs, the remainder being written in
C (as is the Lisp
interpreter itself). Emacs Lisp is also referred to as
Elisp, although there is also an older, unrelated Lisp dialect with that name.