to brian

[Tril]

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2 wrote:

> 	Indeed, my project will resemble yours (David's) in some ways.

Allright, we've decided to do separate projects. That's what I wanted to
hear, one way or the other.  You're doing your own because you're sort of
isolated, OK.  Why don't we work on our own separate projects, and help
each other on them.  If we're both right, like I hope we are, we'll be
able to combine our systems as soon as one of them reaches a point
expressive enough to reason about the other.

Let's say the TUNES project is an idea, a goal to strive for.  We (you, I,
and Fare) are working together on our TUNES ideal from different
directions.  We should try to create a common terminology, to describe our
common ideal.  I'm not sure how we can create the terminology now.  Maybe
we need to learn more about the system, through our implementations,
first.  Or we can work on it through the discussion list.

Let's compare our ideas:
> However, I already have plans to turn it into a proto-Tunes system, with
> horrible efficiency at first, which will allow us to have a persistent
> system to reason about in terms of its semantical problems as well as
> its efficiency problems.  For instance, I'm interested to know what kind
> and how large the minimal object system will be which can reason about
> itself (on the VM) in a computationally-complete way.  

Do you want to reason about semantic and efficiency problems in e-mail,
talking about the system, or do you want to do that reasoning within the
system itself?  Please clarify.

> Keep in mind that
> my objects are not computational objects in the conventional sense, but
> mathematical (logical?) objects within a temporal context (an inadequate
> description, I know, but perhaps you will get the gist of it).

No, I don't :)  What do you mean "temporal"?

> Everything at first will have to be an explicit object (defined as
> elements of main memory) to the VM.  Their fields will not even directly
> be attributes, since those will be separate objects themselves.  Other
> objects will not exist, at first.  I believe that this kind of rigorous
> definition will give us the appropriate framework to start from.  
[and from later on in the message]
> Eventually, the VM should be able to deal with objects not explicitly
> laid out in memory as separate atoms.  

I'm not sure what it is you are making "explicit" here.  What do you mean
"elements of main memory"?

> We
> should develop a VM which will represent in itself with an (eventually
> appropriate) structure of objects (remember that I mean to have each
> structure an individual object as well).  

There are some grammar problems with this sentence, which makes it even
harder to decipher than it would have been with good grammar.  fix?

> I want to trace the operations
> of the system as it interacts with the user through a dialog interface
> and study the results to evaluate our design considerations for the VM.

Design considerations?
Who is tracing whom?  Are you tracing my use of the system, or your own?
Is the user interacting with the dialog interface, or are you tracing the
system using a dialog interface (ambiguous grammar)?

> Even the creation of new contexts
> should be done without changing the scheme for representing objects,
> until that is we have developed the ideas necessary to include this
> within the system's capabilities in a Tunes-friendly way.

Everything should use one representation for objects?  I have that, too.

David Manifold <dem@tunes.org>