At Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:37:58 +0200, Alfred M Szmidt wrote: > > Pids are also broken for another reason: they are public entries in > a globally shared, mutable namespace. > > If and only if one considers globally shared mutable namespaces > broken. People with a lispish background don't.
This is ironic, because this is precisely the reason why the Hurd is not a LispOS. http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-paper.html [talking about lack of extensibility in traditional kernels] Some systems have tried to address these difficulties. Smalltalk-80 and the Lisp Machine both represented one method of getting around the problem. System code is not distinguished from user code; all of the system is accessible to the user and can be changed as need be. Both systems were built around languages that facilitated such easy replacement and extension, and were moderately successful. But they both were fairly poor at insulating users and programs from each other, failing one of the principal goals of OS design. Thanks, Marcus _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
