Hi,

"Alejandro F. Reimondo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> For people that understand "sustainability" as the ability to
>  continue evolving, other tools are available and better
>  than languages.
> The language is not as important as the actions made on
>  the system itself.

So I hear you talking about systems versus languages, and that systems
are more interesting because they are unconstrained.

That seems compatible with what I understand Ian is working on
(building a basis for a system where every limit can be changed at
runtime).  The work that I'm trying to do is to allow multiple systems
to reside in the same CPU and address space.

The languages come secondary, they each are just a means to
communicate with the system.  But they are necessary, for those of us
who want a TTY interface to the system (the 70s-era people like
myself).  Those who want a graphical interface will want to wait for
(or help work on) something like the IDE that I saw Takashi working on
while I visited VPRI in June.  Those with a telephony interface will
want....

The point is you are looking at the bootstrap, and though you may find
it repulsive, the ideal is not to make the bootstrap prettier, it is
to get to the point where you too can contribute (i.e. there's a
working "Smalltalk-80" application).

> We can try to define a language for all persons and
>  a law for all systems; or... we can try to work to modify
>  a systems that has booted +30years ago.
> The tools for each work can´t be the same, because
>  the objetives and the methods are not the same.

The main difference I see with Smalltalk is that it (or Squeak at
least) uses a virtual machine, which is implemented in C, and cannot
be modified from the Smalltalk portion of the code.  It is reasonable
to consider taking a Squeak image, running it on a COLA-implemented VM
that gives bytecode access to the COLA compiler, and gradually
evolving that image to something that can take full advantage of COLA.

If we did that, and still had a TTY interface to the underlying
COLA-based VM, would you still say that the tools "can't be the same"?

All the best,

-- 
Michael FIG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> //\
   http://michael.fig.org/    \//

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