Why LispOS?

[Christopher J. Vogt]

At 10:38 AM -0600 3/25/98, Rodrigo Ventura wrote:
>>>>>> "Christopher" == "Christopher J Vogt" <vogt@computer.org> writes:
>
>
>    Christopher> A side affect of all this is that you virtually never
>have a crash.  No
>    Christopher> system freeze, no blue screen of death, no core dump.
>Most people ran
>    Christopher> their Lispm until it ran out of virtual memory space,
>which in my case was
>    Christopher> between once a week and once a month.  With todays
>gigabyte disks, I could
>    Christopher> run for months without booting.
>
>        Hum, is that really needed? You can run UNIX for years without
>a reboot. I assume our LispOS will have that for granted, and event
>not require reboot, but just a (gc).

I consider most of my use of UNIX as a nightmare, and as such I have attempted
to not remember much of what happened then.  However, I do remember booting
quite requently, and further I remember lots of programs dumping core.  I
also remember a time at Symbolics when we were getting complaints about how
long it took to boot up a machine, and somebody wrote, tongue in cheek, that
the Sun they were using booted much faster than the Symbolics, and it was
a good thing too, because he was rebooting multiple times a day.

>
>    Christopher> Ever use a program and wonder how they coded it?  On a
>lispm you could just
>    Christopher> "break" the program and poke around.  If it was system
>software, the
>    Christopher> sources were included and you could m-. (edit definition)
>from the debugger
>    Christopher> and be in the editor looking at the source code.
>
>    Christopher> The System Constrcution Tool (SCT) was like defsystem on
>steroids.  I still
>    Christopher> miss the patching facility.  m-x Add Patch and friends
>(Add Changed
>    Christopher> Definitions etc.).
>
>        That's a great feature. Can it be said that it reaches the
>level of changing code on-the-fly, or even build a program while
>running/debuging it. It could speed-up enormously development speed.

Every morning when I came to work I did a (load-patches) and all the
patches that had been made to all the programs I was running
since I last did a (load-patches) were loaded.  This included OS
patches, editor patches, etc.  I think most Common Lisp environments
today support "changing code on-the-fly".

Christopher (Chris) J. Vogt
mailto:vogt@computer.org
Omaha, NE
http://members.home.com/vogt/