Let's begin SchemeOS

[Rodrigo Ventura]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Prescod <papresco@technologist.com> writes:

    Paul> You think that this is a flaw, but it is actually a strength. 

    Paul> People don't want a "transparent" file system:

    Paul>  * they want to know when something is saved (the word "saved" has its
    Paul> root the word "safe")
    Paul>  * they want to know *what drive* something is on (for reasons of
    Paul> storage size, portability, security, and physical locality)
    Paul>  * they want to name their data objects
    Paul>  * they want to group those data objects with hierarchical names (at
    Paul> least)

        I may be right as far as old-fashion computational people's
desires are. But what we are proposing here is _not_ a replacement for
UNIX. It is LispOS, with a bunch of new compuitational concepts that
go beyond the old-fashioned shell-program-disk design.

        Do you know what your words make me remind of? When
multitasking OS's appeared, and people prefered older ones, because
"they wanted to know in what memory address a program started". They
didn't liked code relocation, neither virtual memory, because in that
way they didn't knew whenever data were in memory or in disk.

        What we want is to dettach from old computational paradigms
and start riding towards a new one. Doesn't it sound sexy?

        Let me now answer how this new paradigm can answer your
questions:
        * There is a fsync() syscall to assure all cached data is
saved. In the same fashion, a sync-like function could exist to assure
that all objects are saved on disk;
        * Explicit drive specification could be attained as
needed. Otherwise, let the system organize itself. Wouldn't it be
great, to have several disks and letting the system take care of
distributing them?
        * Any object can be bounded to a symbol (actually, the symbol
is bound to that object);
        * Hierarchy of objects is crucial for LispOS. The old package
system must be improved.

        Regards,

-- 
--

*** Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura, alias <Yoda>
***  yoda@isr.ist.utl.pt, http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt/~yoda
***   Instituto de Sistemas e Robotica, Polo de Lisboa
***    Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal
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