Let's begin SchemeOS

[Paul Prescod]

Chris Bitmead wrote:
> 
> As I've said before, I can't see enormous point in a Scheme OS
> without a Persistent store replacing the file system. That is
> where major, order of magnitude increases in productivity are
> going to occur. This is where the superiority of the system will
> make UNIX/Windows junkies sit up and take notice. It removes the
> need for programs to continually convert everything from disk to
> memory representation, but more importantly, it allows a user of
> the system to easily write cute little Scheme scripts that do
> incredibly powerful things. 

Well, it doesn't make sense to go into this whole debate again, but I
think you've misplaced the "blame" for Unix's hassles. The problem is
not that Unix has a filesystem, but that software usually stores
information in that filesystem in random, incompatible file formats with
no natural mapping to memory objects. On a system with a file system
where the files are persistent objects, I can do this:

(define bad-guys (read-file "/etc/bad.lsp"))
(define users (read-file "/etc/passwd.lsp"))
(write-file 
     (filter 
         (lambda (x) (member x bad-guys)))
     "/etc/passwd.lsp")

Even Unix allows this!

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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