What is a ``reflective'' system?

[Bill House]

Jordan Henderson wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>Perhaps the Lisp assembly could assemble down to the LispVM.  But, what 
>will the LispVM be written in?  C?  This might work well with Flux OS, 
>which seems to define it's interfaces in C language terms.  Also, if 
>we're assembling down to a LispVM, then we could influence the LispVM 
>design to make sure there are good subroutine and exception mechanisms 
>built into it at a low level, and then make the assembler a very high 
>level assembler, complete with all kinds of syntactic sugar and 
>syntactic support for exceptions.  Maybe I need to be posting this to 
>the LispVM list.  I hope they are looking at Dis from Inferno.  
>There's reason to believe that a register based VM like Dis is orders 
>of magnitude simpler to implement as a JIT compiler and much-much 
>smaller (I understand that Acer and other's have chosen Inferno to build 
>NetPCs on instead of Java because they estimate the VM and support will 
>be 1 MB of RAM instead of 4 MB of RAM required for JVM).
>
I like these ideas. LispVM is in all likelihood going to be written in C,
although I suppose there's some merit to the idea of writing it in Scheme using
Gambit-C.

FWIW, the AgentBase VM runs its SmartLisp test suite in 2MB.

Bill House
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