Clipboards + Meaning

Fare Rideau rideau@nef.ens.fr
Thu, 11 Dec 1997 13:01:21 +0100 (MET)


>>  A program is stored by the meaning of its parts.
>
> Please have a look at the "intentional programming"-project on the
> Microsoft-Research-site.
>
I admit I haven't looked deeply at their site yet, though I've known
it for some time (my engagement in meaning-centric computing
is much much older than that; it's the foundation of Tunes).
   The main problem I see with anything the MS IP project could produce
is that accessing meaning implies freedom to explore the relationships
between objects, for the meaning of an object IS the set of such
relationships. And this freedom strictly opposes the proprietary black-box
model of programming supported by the commercial rackets that dominate
the computer software world.

> For me it does not matter if i would communicate my
> work in P1m and the system would take P60m to perform instead of a
> traditional system performing in P30m binding _me_ to it.
>
You point out another challenge of the Tunes HLL: not only need we be
able to express *invariants*, things that we want unchanged and fixed,
but we also need to be able to express *variants*, things that we want
to decrease and be as small as possible. In this case, that's memory
and time requirements for program completion, and/or for interactive
response.

This makes things much more complex, since it is
very difficult to have precise models of space and time behavior of
programs of given meaning, and since there are strong non-linearity
effects coming from combining lots of programs to use limited caches
(register, L1, L2, DRAM, disk controller, disk, network) that get saturated.
Still, I believe it is possible to give the computer usable approximations
to different notions of efficiency. After all, that's precisely what's
being done in optimizing compilers: trying to minimize an approximation
to execution time, though specified in a very ad-hoc way.

> <<< If you wonder exactly HOW meaning is stored in Tunes, that is what we
> are currently working on (this is the HLL specification I am asking Fare
> for). Feel free to contribute ideas or feedback. >>>
>
> That is really the interesting part. Apart from the project mentioned above
> i propose that you give an understanding of the meaning to the system .
>
That's the whole purpose of the project, and it's much easier said than done.
We're indeed moving at the limit of AI-complete problems, and that's because
the project is not a project for a computer program, but for a man-computer
system, whereby man is part of the system, and NI can cope with the lack of
actual AI.

== Faré -=- (FR) François-René Rideau -=- (VN) Уng-Vû Bân -=- rideau@ens.fr ==
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