Why LispOS?

[Mike McDonald]

>Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 18:58:17 -0600
>From: William Barnett-Lewis <wlewis@mailbag.com>
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>To: Mike McDonald <mikemac@teleport.com>,
>        "lispos@math.gatech.edu" <lispos@math.gatech.edu>
>Subject: Re: Why LispOS?

>Mike McDonald wrote:

>>   Well, I think people have gotten carried away with the OS
>> part. There's a belief that memory management and scheduler HAVE to be
>> written in Lisp for a "LispOS". Sure, given time and EXPERIENCE,
>> that'd be nice. But I think a whole lot can be down running on top of
>> an existing OS, be it some Unix derivitive or even some version of
>> WinDoze. Or all of the above! From the user's environment point of
>> view, it should NOT matter what the underlying OS is. Abstract it and
>> wrap into oblivion!
>>
>
>I think that my problem with the above is that you can only abstract  so
>much of the OS away. Look at the Squeak project; a very portable
>smalltalk VM that is written in smalltalk and then translated into C for
>speed. Versions exist for just about every OS around and the code runs
>the same on all of them... almost. Every so often little OS "features"
>bit one in the butt. The differing file name conventions for example, or
>worse, is a directory separator a / a \ a : or something else?Don't even
>think about versioning...

  Well, when you get to the point where you have experience with what
the OS abstractions should be and those OS "features" are too much to
bear, THEN implement an OS in whatever your favorite language of the
day happens to be. Until then, I think you'd be just adding more
"features"! 

  As for / or \, everyone knows the proper one is ;!
(http://www.harlequin.com/education/books/HyperSpec/Body/sec_19-3-1.html)

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@mikemac.com