Minimum set of primitives?

[Chris Bitmead]

>         Hum, that gives rise to a non-trivial question: how to handle
> references, gc and removable media in an hybrid memory/disk system? I
> mean, what happens if referenced objects are lost? 

You get an exception if you try to access them.

> How "ls -la" things
> would work on such a system?

There would be no "ls -la".

Objects would be put into container objects. Of course, it might
be desirable to have some containers that index things by name
like a UNIX file system. In that case, if you had a container of
documents called "foo", you might do something like....

(names foo) =>
("doc1", "doc2", "doc3", "doc4")

and to access a document by name...

(find-by-name foo "doc1") =>
("a document about Lisp OS....")

-- 
Chris Bitmead
http://www.ans.com.au/~chrisb
mailto:chrisb@ans.com.au