TUNES object interactivity

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Matt,
   you description of your wished OS seems perfectly in phase with the TUNES
project: fine-grained objects that users combine at will to obtain a custom
system adapted to their needs and resources.

>    Also, it seems to me, that I should be able to re-route information exchanged
> between objects.  A good example of this would be a simple keyboard translation
> object or a keyboard macro object, either of which I would like to insert in
> the chain between the low-level kb ISR, and the program-kb interface.
   Yes, by default, *user-interfaced* objects should be wrapped in a "lego"
kit that allows them to be dynamically unplugged and replugged. But for the
sake of efficiency, this can't be the case for all objects (at least, not in
constant time).
   Actually, this is precisely what the Interfaces project is all about:
the HLL project defines objects with clean, well-known semantics. But whenever
there is no precise well-defined semantics for an object, it is defined with
annotations describing what we know about the object, and external heuristics
must replace well-defined behaviour. Of course, the well-defined semantics
can be viewed as a particular case of heuristic-based approach, where the
heuristics is perfectly known and straightforward; or the heuristics-based
approach is a particular case of well-defined semantics, where the heuristics
program is dynamically known and very IO dependent.
   So the retargettability of user-interfaced objects corresponds to the
dynamic character of the heuristics: we modify the way those well-defined
objects interact, to suit our needs.

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