List of non-lurkers

[Henry G. Baker]

Re what sort of Lisp Machine to build:

I would advise starting simple & _small_, and don't start out trying
to emulate the MIT Lisp Machine.  Even the MIT didn't start out trying
to emulate the MIT Lisp Machine!!

Start out with a _simple_, _small_ kernel on top of which other stuff
can run.  The first order of business is memory management and time
management.  Stuff like bignums can come later.

Memory management means both internal and external (disk?) memory
management.  Some sort of persistent OO system for disk would be nice to
aim for, but somehow it has to interact nicely/cleanly with the internal
memory system.  You all might have a look at Peter Bishop's PhD thesis,
in which he discussed such issues.  Multics had a 'memory-mapped' file
system, in which 'segments' were mapped into memory at run-time.  IMHO,
this is a 'good' idea.  You might check out what Object Design is up to
these days.

-- 
Henry Baker
www/ftp directory URL:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html