release 0.0.0.12

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Joyous Tunespeople,
   at last here is release 0.0.0.12 of the TUNES project. The patch being
larger than the release itself, it is not published.

   Notably, apart from the usual WWW changes (merged several files into
the Review; redid the LLL/, LLL/i386/, LLL/OTOP/ pages; new glossary entries),
I hacked up all the i386 code to convert it from TASM to as86+m4, and dropped
the TASM files. TUNES now boots fine as a raw floppy, or loaded by LILO or
loadlinux (it fakes a linux kernel, and even accepts linuxish boot command
lines). It's not doing much: it just jumps in protected mode and back to real
mode, prints the CPU state and halts.

   If I have time, I'll program some annotation-aware generic garbage
collector, and begin exploring annotation-based programming. I'll try to
isolate the i386-specific stuff, and separate any implementation specificity
or optimized code into macros, so we can replace it by any machine language,
including ANSI C. Ever programmed ANSI C as though it were a machine
language ? After all, that's what people boast they use C for: as a portable
machine language. Let's take their word. However, I'd like to have boot-up
code as soon as possible, even if sacrifying portability, so that I can
replace this awful m4 preprocessor (the sole powerful enough macro processor
I found), by a TUNES-based preprocessor.


--    ,        	                                ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
--                                      '                   / .          --
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