Polymorphism (and others)

[Tril]

On Thu, Nov 15, 2001 at 10:27:21PM +0100, Sebastian Nozzi wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> first of all, a question you may have heard tons of times: what's the status on this project?

I will make a status web page soon.  Basically it's "moving forward
slowly."  The organization is this: Several members have their own
projects, which aim to explore and develop tunes related concepts by
trying out their own ideas.  Water is working on his arrows project.  I
have a project which I have not spoken much about on this list about
lately.  Fare can speak for what he is doing (possibly distracted from
TUNES participation at this time).  The TUNES project will currently
encourage and facilitate collaboration between the various individual
projects, and eventually one will be adopted as TUNES, or TUNES will be an
interoperability standards group, or all the projects will combine.
That's my view.

> I hope it very much succeeds. What Tunes aims for is simply what computers nowadays should be (and maybe more). I had quite similar ideas to that of Tunes for an operating system, and to my surprise I find that something similar has already been thought of, and by by-far more qualified people.

I don't know who is more qualified than anyone else, everyone is welcome
to learn and help.  I hope to have a list of things that people need to
have a basic understanding of to know what tunes is about.  If anyone has
suggestions let me know.  (Water has posted some on this topic before)

> I've read the "glossary" but still didn't understand in which way polymorphism is archieved. The author says inheritance is too restrictive and talks about Tunes having something more general, of which inheritance is a particular case. How will be polymorphism be archieved under Tunes?

Well as far as I know we're planning to use generic functions for
polymorphism.  Combined with partial evaluation I think it's the best way,
since the system should also be based on pure functions, using
continuations for anything with a side effect.  That's the approach I
intend to use for my project.  Please ask me to clarify any or all of
these individual "technical terms" if you are not sure you understand, or
know how I am meaning to use them.

> Something I want to be sure of: is this list intended for this kind of questions, or it's only for qualified computer science sutff?

Sure it's fine, thanks for the questions.

-- 
Tril 0. Byte <tril@tunes.org> http://tril.tunes.org/
This message is placed in the public domain.