First proposal: what should LispOS feel like?

[Martin Cracauer]

Mike McDonald writes:

[Mike]
> >>   I vision is of a single user machine. (What percentage of Unix
> >> machine do you think actually have more than one real user on them at
> >> any time? I'd bet it's much less than 10%. And Windows machines? Zero?)

[me]
> >I think our goals can be integrated.
> >
> >My machine is running a Unix kernel and I use the kernel-provided
> >Networking. I can use several Lisp worlds accessing networks, no
> >problem. Manipulating the networking stuff can only be done by using
> >Unix syscalls from some Lisp api.
> >
> >You have one world running as root. You interface your world to
> >the network hardware drivers and provide networking yourself. 

[Mike]
>   Don't we end up with a lot of duplication (code wise) witht these
> two worlds? It'd be nice if we could somehow designate portions of the
> code as static and sharable. Then both worlds could share the common
> base.

As I understand, this is exactly what CMUCL did under Mach. Scott
Fahlman recently said it should be doable for any descent OS memory
interface, but I didn't look into the issue further.

I could be mistaken, but I think it is the whole initial Lisp world
mapped copy-on-write, so that several running world could share the
base world, while still being able to modify it for their individual
needs.
 
> >>   I already have one of these. :-) I'll send you my .ctwrm file that
> >> gives me Select-E, Select-M, Select-N, Select-W, Select-D, Select-S,
> >> and Select-T. (Select-L is on my home machine.) I use Caps-Lock for
> >> the select key. Works great! 
> >
> >No go. I use Capslock for backspace already :-]
> 
>   Ah, an ole Symbolics keyboard fanatic! My former coworker had me set
> up his xmodmap to do that too. Anyway, that should free up the
> BackSpace key then! :-) (Pick any key, it's user configurable.)
 
How did you configure your Window manager to react on character
*sequences*, BTW? My one can only react on single keystrokes, which
may be modified by Mtea, Control, Shift, of course. But I can't make
it recognize something like 'backspace followed by L', although I
could make it react on 'Backspace together with L'.
 
Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>
http://cracauer.cons.org
Fax +49 40 522 85 36