[ANN] SqueakOS

[Brian Rice]

At 10:10 AM 10/12/99 +0200, Mahler Thomas wrote:
>Hi Brian,
>
>I tested SqueakOS yesterday. It's a really cool thing.
>
>I strongly support your idea that squeak (and SqueakOS) is a good
>candidate for bootstrapping TUNES.
>
>It's obvious that Smalltalk blocks are equivalent to anonymous functions
>but I am not aware that squeak supports a Lisp development environment.
>
>Did you implement some kind of Lisp interpreter in Squeak?
>As I'm playing a lot with Squeak I'd like to see this kind of thing!
>
>Did you continue your work on the Arrows prototype? I did not find any
>updates on your page http://www.tunes.org/~water/
>
>If you have any new stuff please let me know.
>
>cheers,
>
>Thomas
>

Well, there is a Lisp interpreter (Lisp.st) in the Squeak discussion area
(as well as one for Prolog), under the packages or utilities section, I
believe.  However, I can't verify the address at all because my net access
is basically down for a week or two.  It was a fairly simple matter for me
to modify a Workspace and Transcript to get a tiny interactive compiler
going, but so far I've been concentrating on the actual interpreter
mechanics.  Unfortunately, I don't have a complete Arrow programming system
ready for anyone, not even myself.  I simply haven't figured out a good set
of tools for working with Arrow that can be handled by Arrow objects
themselves.  It would be nice if I had analogues of "eval" and "apply" or
something similar, but I haven't been able to sort out the functionality of
the system well enough to develop some simple fundamental concepts.

My paper is also well overdue for an update, which should be forthcoming in
two weeks.  The new material will contain a lot of answers to questions
that have been posted to the e-mail list and the irc.  (Yes, I admit to
mining the files for the desired data.)  I've also been considering
starting up an Arrow mailing list and FAQ once these basic coding problems
are worked out, and possibly registering a domain-name (hopefully,
www.arrow.org hasn't been taken).  All of this hinges on whether the basic
environment can be made usable (which it is far from at this point), but my
current two-week vacation should allow me the room to work this out soon
enough.

	Brian