All a symbolic link is, is a pointer from one "file" to another "file". The reason those are in " is because *everything* in *nix is considered a file, whether it's a file, directory, block device, character device, tape drive, named pipe, etc... All arguments given to a symbolic link will be compared against the binary's to see if they can run and will run using the linked binary if possible. Example below:

$ which ls
/bin/ls

$ ln -s /bin/ls $HOME/foo
$ cd $HOME && ls -l foo
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 7 Jan 22 09:07 foo -> /bin/ls

$ $HOME/foo -l
<complete listing of your home here>


Now, we created a symbolic link to ls to our $HOME dir (our login home) named foo. Passing
the argument '-l' (for list) to the 'foo' command just got piped to the actual ls binary and it recognized '-l' as a valid argument and listed accordingly. Here's some more info from 'man ln' on my HP server at work:

Hard links are created with the same ownerships and permissions as the
file or directory to which they are linked. If ownership or
permissions are changed on a link or file, the same changes appear on
corresponding hard links. The ln command does not permit hard links
to a directory.

Symbolic links are created with the ownership of the creator and the
permissions are of the creator's current umask. Once created, the
symbolic link ownership and permissions will not change, since the
mode and ownership of the symbolic link is ignored by the system.
Also, you can't create hard links across file systems. They have to reside on the
same file system. Hard links used to have it where if you modified them in any
way, it would modify the original file. Example:

$ touch foo (create foo)
$ ln foo bar (bar is now a hardlink to foo, both a zero-length file)
$ echo "test" >> bar (echo something into bar)
$ ls -l foo bar
-rw-r--r-- 2 root sys 5 Jan 22 09:13 bar
-rw-r--r-- 2 root sys 5 Jan 22 09:13 foo


As you can see, when you echoed "test" into bar, it updated foo. Now, if I removed
foo or bar, the other would remain. It used to be where if you removed the hard link,
it would remove the file (aka, rm bar would also rm foo) but that's since changed. Let
me know if you want more info on this...symlinks and hardlinks are pretty interesting
and may vary on different systems (info above is on HP systems). By default though,
sym links don't share the same inode as the original file whereas hard links do, hence
the removal of both when one or the other is removed.

From what you wrote, it looks like 'mcedit' is perhaps a shell script that executes the
editor. Having not run midnight commander, I don't know, but I could find out soon
enough.