LLL

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear fellow joyous tunespeople,
   because of exams, as I said, I will stop any TUNES work until after
April 20. Till then, I'll only administer patches to the pages and the
code. An interim coordinator would be most welcome.
   As usual, any feedback about the WWW pages will always be appreciated...

   Now, I'm looking for LLL men (Raul ? have you got time to spare from your
MuP21 board ? ;-), to develop seriously the LLL.
   I've begun to write a FORTH kernel using the m4 preprocessor, so that
it would generate assembly for any configured CPU, and began configuring
the i386 CPU, and thought about ANSI C (w/ or w/o GNU extensions) as another
target.
   The LLL men should complete this work, and merge it w/ the i386 boot
code (and/or write a C main() routine to test the C version). Surely, many
ugly m4 macros should be written in the process (many already have been,
and could serve as an example), which will be made obsolete when the HLL
comes out, and makes a breeze out of intelligent choice between multiple
versions.
   Also, the LLL men should take ANS FORTH as a basis to implement the
LLL, but be ready to sacrifice ANS conformation so that we can achieve
clean migration (which again encompasses persistency, swapping out,
garbage collection, multithreading, remote procedure call, resource
adaptation, reversible or definitive partial evaluation, portability, etc),
and extensibility (so that the HLL be a natural extension to the LLL).
   Particularly, side effects and global variables should be eradicated
whenever possible, words should replace variables, scoping should be
introduced cleanly, integer/pointer normalization words introduced for the
GC, stack layout restrictions enforced for PAUSEs, parsing should be made
much more parametrizable than is w/ ANS FORTH, and many many portability
words should be added, even if having null implementations for the
current i386 and POSIX implementations (e.g. null BLOCK words using
implicit virtual memory); we shall trust the partial evaluator to
simplify them away.

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