Tunes

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

> Roger Espel told me about the Tunes project you are implementing.  I
> have some questions.
>
> * Is the HLL similar to Scheme?
>
Somehow, yes: all the basic Scheme constructs will be present
[but full arithmetics, at first].
However, I think Scheme is very low-level,
and the programmer must eventually be able to restrict the
semantics of his programs so as to prove them correct and/or
to allow optimization: giving more typing information,
particularly uniqueness annotation of types, etc.

> * Does it include a terse language suited for interactive use?
>
I intend to personally support interaction in
both the Scheme-like language with a structured editor,
and a Forth-like mode (see HP RPL) with a visible stack,
plus the usual management of keyboard/mouse/joystick/whatever events.
Others are free to use whatever they want,
as long as they interface it to the system.

> * Does the concept of users enter into Tunes, and does Tunes handle
> remote logins?
"Users" in Tunes are not a static concept as with Unix UIDs.
Rather, a "User" is just what the set of variables and constants
in the current scope define it to be.
   Protection is done through visibility and a strongly-typed scoped language.
If you export it, everyone can use it. If you export a get method,
not a set method, then you have a variable exported read-only.
If you don't export an object, nobody can see it. You can arbitrarily
wrap your objects and export them to whoever you want.
Once it's exported, anyone can use it who imported it in its scope.
Of course, there will eventually be lots of standard wrappers,


> * Are all objects saved to disk automatically?
Yes. Even if power fails, when you reboot the machine,
you find out that a ***consistent*** state was saved and restored
so that you didn't lose more than xxx seconds of work worth
[xxx depends on the speed of your machine and disks,
and on parameters you set,
because you hate it when the machine spends so much time writing the
current state that it doesn't do much anything else].


IMPORTANT NOTE: Implementation has not gone very far. Any help welcome.

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