I'm pretty new to lisp, and because I know no-one
who uses lisp, I'm putting these stupid questions to
this newsgroup.
- Is there a "natural" OS for lisp? Like C-Unix.
- Do the lisp-machines use an OS ? Or was it all just
part of the lisp-image. If so how did they see multitasking, or
filesystems ?
- Is there on-line information about the older lisp machines and
compilers/interpreters ?
BTW: I know that you can use lisp on (nearly) every OS. But
nobody can argue that C and Unix are linked. I don't want
to start any religious wars.
Yours,
Peter Van Eynde
I'm pretty new to lisp, and because I know no-one
who uses lisp, I'm putting these stupid questions to
this newsgroup.
There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers (usually given by
Weenix Unies).
- Is there a "natural" OS for lisp? Like C-Unix.
Symbolics Genera. (In my pig-headed opinion, anyways, other opinions
may vary).
- Do the lisp-machines use an OS ?
My LispM's use Genera. Non-Symbolics LispM's use other things that
I'm not familiar with. For the rest of this post, by "lisp-machines"
I will assume you mean Symbolics LispM's, and not LispM's from LMI,
TI, or Xerox.
Or was it all just part of the lisp-image.
Genera is indeed loaded into your Lisp image. In fact, it IS your
Lisp image, until you add something else.
If so how did they see multitasking, or filesystems ?
Full preemptive multitasking and a robust filesystem are provided by
Genera to the entire system. Multitasking is implemented by "stack
groups", which hold seperate control, data, and binding stacks for an
individual process. The system also support lightweight processes
(called "simple processes") that are used for certain low-level
routines and run in the Scheduler's stack group.
The filesystem is very nice, including automatic file versioning, hard
file "types", intelligent pathname defaulting, arbitrary user-defined
properties, two-level file removal (delete, then expunge), etc.
- Is there on-line information about the older lisp machines and
compilers/interpreters ?
<a href="http://www.inference.com/~rwk/symbolics/">Symbolics Museum</a>
BTW: I know that you can use lisp on (nearly) every OS. But
nobody can argue that C and Unix are linked. I don't want
to start any religious wars.
C and Unix are evil. Period.
From: Richard M. Alderson III
Subject: Re: is there a natural os for lisp
Date:
Message-ID: <aldersonDDuF35.vA@netcom.com>
In article <·····················@reks.uia.ac.be> ······@hhipe.uia.ac.be
(*Student) writes:
>- Is there a "natural" OS for lisp? Like C-Unix.
For non-LispM systems, I would say that Lisp probably most naturally went with
PDP-10 hardware and operating systems, especially ITS (MACLISP), TENEX/Tops-20
(MACLISP, INTERLISP), and WAITS (MACLISP, LISP 1.6).
>- Do the lisp-machines use an OS ? Or was it all just part of the lisp-image.
> If so how did they see multitasking, or filesystems ?
If you can write an OS (that is, understand the concepts involved), you can do
multitasking and filesystems in any language you wish. If there is a language
that falls naturally together with your hardware, you use it. Ergo, Lisp as
the systems language on LispMs.
>- Is there on-line information about the older lisp machines and
> compilers/interpreters ?
A good place to start is
http://www.inference.com/~rwk/symbolics/
--
Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
what not.
--J. R. R. Tolkien,
········@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_
······@hhipe.uia.ac.be (*Student) wrote:
>I'm pretty new to lisp, and because I know no-one
>who uses lisp, I'm putting these stupid questions to
>this newsgroup.
>
>- Is there a "natural" OS for lisp? Like C-Unix.
>
>- Do the lisp-machines use an OS ? Or was it all just
> part of the lisp-image. If so how did they see multitasking, or
> filesystems ?
>
>- Is there on-line information about the older lisp machines and
> compilers/interpreters ?
I don't know much about natural Lisp's OS of typical machine.
But, I read old Symbolics's documentation and found their OS is
Genera(I heard Symbolics was a major Lisp-machine company).
Maybe Lisp-machine's hardware and OS structure is designed
for efficiency of Lisp.
I don't know this will help you, but there is "The Online
Symbolics Museum":
http://www.inference.com/~rwk/symbolics/
Jong-Won Choi