RFC: TUNES Specification Pre-Pre-Draft

[Brian T Rice]

P.S.:

> So basically, I would describe your viewpoint as being that of someone
> reconstructing a context after the thing happened. This is not really
> supported by the way we suggest that TUNES could work, although there is
> an analogy (which I will explain in a second). In our case, we can
> formally describe a language in advance: part of this is the syntax/
> grammar that encodes the expressions entered, and the other part consists
> of the possible changes in state of the evaluator, and these combine to
> form the notion of context.

The analogy I was thinking of but neglected to explain was that not all
systems TUNES interacts with will be formalizable, in which case models
have to be formed, but those will often be partially inaccurate due to
bugs in the target system (C++, anyone? :). There are also language
systems or contexts which can be built up procedurally, in which case
reconstruction would have to occur for a debugging context to be realized,
for example. However, in that case we could rely on TUNES' persistence
capabilities when a safe persistence semantics is chosen.

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