Tunes core existed in 1991

Pete Gonzalez gonz@ratloop.com
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 01:54:02 -0400 (EDT)


On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Paul Dufresne wrote:

> Actually I just finished the Introduction (Chapter 2 of 15) and so I
> can't give much details on the how. But it's about writing a
> meta-evaluator for a reflective tower of evaluator, where each
> evaluator in the tower, evaluate the program under it (an evaluator
> for the program under it). Well, I hope I am right but it's not
> a problem if I am wrong because you will read it by yourself. :-)

Hmm...  judging from his web page, it appears he hasn't done any further
work on the project since 1991, which isn't a great sign.  Also, like you
I found that by Chapter 2 he still hadn't actually given anything except
vague formalisms.  Hopefully this is a consequence of it being a thesis
(i.e. the political need to look like a lot of work =) ), but really if
it's the Right Thing it should be possible to clearly explain the gist of
the design in just a few pages.  (This is historically true of any major
language innovation -- COM, OOP, exception handling, functional
programming -- it takes years to discover, but only a short explanation
and an example to clearly present.)

The closest "gist" I could find was this:

	http://www.cb1.com/~john/research/PhD/PhD.html

Maybe I'm just still to new to all of this, but I had a lot of trouble
seeing anything revolutionary there.

-Pete