The VM Goals

[John Wood]

Hi everyone,

I've just joined this list - I'm a senior technology consultant at royalblue 
corporation, mainly involved in the production of merchant trading systems - 
but I have a great interest in general software standards and moving them 
forward with the pace of technology.   I have also done a lot of research into 
Intentional Programming (a technology conceived by Charles Simonyi of 
Microsoft Research) and so I feel that I can contribute greatly to this 
project in terms of innovation.

I have one initial question - to what extent is the LispVM required to be 
specific to the Lisp language?  I feel that if we want to produce a "virtual 
processor" specification which is ultimately universal, then we should be 
looking at something wider than a model which fits the Lisp architecture.  I 
recall Bill House mentioning that Lisp can ultimately describe the features of 
all languages, but I think we should be considering something flexible enough 
to fit future language requirements than just past languages.  Comments?

John