Moose (You guys...)

[Dan Odom]

Geez, I go out of town for one lousy week and you guys start
(semi-) interesting conversations without me!  Oh, well.

Revision -72 looked pretty fair, but I have a few minor things that
I would like to add/change/point out:

1)  Device Drivers:  We need to have user-installable device drivers.
      I personally prefer the Unix style of device driver, but the MS-DOS
      style isn't bad (it's just not as good, IMHO).  This way, we don't
      have to include ANY I/O in the kernel; we can have a device
      named 'STDOUT' or 'TTY' or 'CON', and that device will
      represent the screen.  Our C RTL can then send output from
      printf (), etc. to that device.

2)  Rather than saying 'This OS is a GUI!', I think that we should allow
      the user to write his/her own shell.  I personally would like
      a csh-ish interface; I could add my own.  One of my friends likes
      the X interface; he could add his own X-like interface.

3)  Making the kernel object-oriented would be a real pain in the rear,
      and also increase the amount of required memory.  I say that
      we do a traditional kernel, and then write OO shells for it in
      C++ and ObjectPascal.  That way, we'd still be able to code like:

         class MyInputDevice : public GenericInputDevice
           {
              ...
           }

      but the kernel could be kept simple.

4)  We need to spend quite a bit of time on the high-level specifications
      before we move on to the low-level stuff.  Let's not worry about
      implementation stuff until we've got the abstract stuff down.

*****

---> Dan