RFC: HLL Architecture outline

[Brian T Rice]

Hi all,

I've been expanding on the "Dispatch" idea which I posted a week ago, and
I seem to have worked out a kind of thesis statement and architecture for
the HLL to solve the Tunes design problems.

There's a page describing the main idea at:
http://tunes.org/new/HLL/architecture
and
http://tunes.org/new/HLL/

The HLL subproject is likely to get re-organized to support this idea, but
I'd like to know what you about it. Fare and Dan Moniz and a few others
have seen some drafts of this already, and responded positively.

Anyway, here's the bird's-eye perspective:

We should organize the Tunes project around language architectures, not
particular languages themselves. In this sense, "HLL" and "LLL" could come
to mean "High-level Language Library" and "Low-level Language Library",
where each provided a standard set of parts which composed according to
the general architecture outlined in the page above, which for repeating,
consists of: input-runtime-output corresponding to Read-Eval-Print from
Lisp, and at the basic level consists of Parse-Expand-Search-Dispatch-
Rewrite-Response.

This is not intended to be a universal model of languages, but is intended
to be widely-applicable and extensible enough to cover most of the claims
made about Tunes, while still being feasible.

There haven't been many comments lately, but this is the most radical
proposal I've made for Tunes plans yet, so if you have any concerns or
comments, please voice them.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/