MOOSE -- more comments

[Michael David WINIKOFF]

Hi!
More comments from the land down under ...

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Important things first ... why do we want a "serious" (read stuffy, suit etc.)
name? We've allready decided to target our OS at PROGRAMMERS not suits ...

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MUSIC
~~~~~~

(1) Event driven -- yes. The actual method where the UIMS calls routines 
provided by the application is called "call back functions" and is the way X
does things. I'd prefer to do things the mac/Amiga way -- the application reads
from an input event queue and decides what to do with the stuff on it's own.
Why? Apart from concurrentcy problems (the driver shouldn't call a function 
while a previous function is executing otherwise we have to write programs with
concurrency in mind) call back functions are simply not as versatile.
The "language" used to declare them cannot be as flexible as a full programming
language which is what we have to play around with using the Mac/Amiga event
queue approach.

Regards Andreas' suggestion of having the device drivers call functions:
I don't like it (sorry!) -- it's essentially an implementation of call back
functions that slows down and more importantly complicates device drivers.


Oh, and in general avoid doing things the X way just in case we might end up 
like X -- 
   respectively; see {glob}).  2. [after the name of an earlier
   window system called `W'] An over-sized, over-featured,
   over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system
   developed at MIT and widely used on UNIX systems.
[TNHD]

(2) Pipes -- YES. The actual details of the user interface actions to do this
should perhaps be made simpler but the idea should definately be there.

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I agree strongly with Gary about putting the cart b4 the horse.
Since the system is designed to be flexible we should find that the kernel
we design should be capable fo supporting a GUI -- if this is not the case
then we have failed to produce a flexible and extensible system.

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I've just read through Dennis' latest post.
Great work! 
I'm looking forward to the next version (negative infinity plus one? :-)

one comment regards Motorola processors: There exist "EC" (economy) versions
of the processors which typically don't have MMUs -- unfortunately these are
used in Amigas which kinda makes virtual memory impossible on a run of the mill
Amiga.
(It is possible to upgrade to an MMU though ...)

I'll start work on an overview document -- hopefully I'll have it ready sometime
next week.

Keep up the good work and the discussions!

Michael

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Michael Winikoff
winikoff@cs.mu.oz.au
Computer science honours. University of Melbourne, Australia.