Don't hardwire OS features

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

>>: Fare
>: Alaric

>> Well, that's basic reflection vocabulary:
>> Reifying an object means taking a manipulable representation for it.
>> The reverse operation is absorbing a object,
>> which means adding a new feature to the system
>> by making such object part of it.
> 
> Ah, right. I'd call that "extraction", I guess;
I haven't seen "extraction" used for that.
Reification is a fairly standard term in the community
of people working on reflective systems.

> that refers to the 
> operation in Self where an object and all the objects it depends upon 
> are located, so they can be transported to another system etc.
That is called "migration".
In Tunes, we generalize migration
to any change of representational context
that conserves abstract semantics.
Basically, migration is some kind of controlled
reification+rewrite+absorption
(that is, reification+rewrite+absorption
is the low-level way migration is implemented;
they constitute the representation/reification of migration).

>>[...]
> I'd be using totally different words for most of this, but I know 
> what you mean :-)
Yeah, having common definition for words is always
a basic problem for communication.
Hence, dictionaries, glossaries, registries, standards, RFCs, etc
(send feedback about
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Tunes/Glossary.html).
I hate the ISO practice
of forbidding free retransmission of their standards
by electronic means.

>> Yeah, with these systems, you are not free to run unsafe code or not,
>> you're bound to run *their* code or run no code.
>
> Well, you're welcome to run unsafe code. Just you'd be taking ae
> risk! See, for example, the Exploder OCX - I don't have a URL handy,
> but there was an ActiveX control example that put up a window saying
> "Click here or I'll reboot your machine". It was signed, by the guy
> who wrote it (via VeriSign, an independent RSA certificating
> company). When you clicked on it in a browser, up came a dialog 
> asking "Do you trust this guy?"...
>
Funny. Tell me if you find back the URL.
Anyway, signing without the signature implying
legal/financial responsibility is not worth much.

== Fare' -- rideau@ens.fr -- Franc,ois-Rene' Rideau -- DDa(.ng-Vu~ Ba^n ==
Join the TUNES project for a computing system based on computing freedom !
                TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient System
URL: "http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Tunes/"