microkernels
Thomas M. Farrelly
s720@ii.uib.no
Fri, 10 Sep 1999 19:35:01 +0200
Laurent Martelli wrote:
>
> >>>>> "Beholder" == Beholder <beholder@bespin.dhs.org> writes:
>
> Beholder> Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:
>
> >> I do agree that the most important point is to have the right
> >> primitives; and that's perhaps what I'd like a no-kernel to be
> >> about: focus the design attention on the semantics of primitives,
> >> rather than on particular implementation mechanisms, that should
> >> be hardware-dependent (which is I think a positive contribution
> >> of exo/nano-kernel approaches, independently from their kernelful
> >> aspect).
>
> Beholder> What primitives do you suggest?
>
> I'd suggest something very close to Lisp or Scheme : objects,
> functions, you can call functions with objects as arguments and get a
> a result, you can define new functions as calls to already defined
> functions (lambda). The state of the system should be persistent : if
> you shutdown the system, and restart it, you should have the same
> state sa before the shutdown. That's all you need I think. (plus a
> number of "hardcoded" standard functions such as and, or, if, =, cons,
> car, cdr).
>
Primitives in the sence of "hardcoded" mess up reflection - it's not
possible to alter their definition. And primitives are not strictly
nessacary anyway ( see TOOL ) .
So, loose the primitives.
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Thomas M. Farrelly s720@ii.uib.no www.lstud.ii.uib.no/~s720
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