Dreme: a distributed dialect of Scheme

Massimo Dentico m.dentico@galactica.it
Tue, 12 Sep 2000 19:31:53 +0200


"Dreme: for Life in the Net", by Matthew Fuchs

Excerpt from Matthew Fuchs home page:
- http://www.cs.nyu.edu/phd_students/fuchs/

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The dissertation covers a lot of territory, including:

*    Dreme, a distributed dialect of Scheme where all first  class
 objects   are   mobile  in  the  Internet.  Correct  interprocess
 communication is ensured through Scheme's lexical scoping rules -
 regardless  of  where objects migrate during a  computation  (the
 Dreme interpreter was written in early 1993).

*    An  implementable  distributed garbage  collection  algorithm
 which  eventually collects all garbage (including cycles)  on  an
 open network without any centralized or hierarchical coordination,
 meaning  it scales with the length of reference chains,  not  the
 size of the network.

*    How to escape the ubiquitous GUI event loop and eliminate the
 tortured,   dismembered  programming  style  it  engenders.   The
 essential   realization  is  that  "reactive  programming"   with
 callbacks is really a twisted form of Continuation Passing Style,
 a  source  code  transformation commonly used  in  compilers  for
 functional languages.

*    A  way  to  express user interfaces in a completely  platform
 independent fashion using SGML and a local interpreter. This also
 shows why HTML will eventually die and be replaced by SGML.
==================================================================


-- 
Massimo Dentico