thinking about virtual machines, etc.

[Christopher J. Vogt]

At 11:02 AM -0500 4/27/97, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Maybe the people who worked on the Lisp machines could explain to me why
>this environment really has to be Lisp-centric. What seems to me to be
>interesting to it is that
>
>a) the operating system services are written in a dynamic HLL, source is
>available, and you may trace into "services"
>
>b) rather than passing around streams one passes around objects. Rather
>than serializing objects explicitly you just mark them persistent
>
>c) really good Lisp development tools are available.
>
>It sounds to me that what we are talking about, then, is a nice object
>oriented (as opposed to file oriented) operating system with really
>tight emacs bindings. Is there any reason it should be Lisp-centric,
>then? The Java and SmallTalk people would probably be also interested in
>such a system. It might actually stand a chance of mainstream success if
>we team up with others who are rebelling against systems without the
>properties above.

If I understand you, your question is "Why use Lisp instead of some other
language?".  Macros, infinite length integers allocated as necessary,
readtables, hash tables, sequences, gc, array bounds checking, exception
handling, debug facilities, and eval to name just a few.

Read reti's comments in the "Slow Down!!" therad, he discusses some of the
practical advantages of having some of the things I have mentioned.

Christopher (Chris) J. Vogt
mailto:vogt@novia.net
Omaha, NE
http://www.novia.net/~vogt/