From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: In- and Out-of- core editors (was Re: Which one, Lisp or Scheme?)
Date:
Message-ID: <ey3u3n7kaot.fsf@staffa.aiai.ed.ac.uk>
* Simon Brooke wrote:
> In article <··············@violet.csl.sri.com>,
> ···@violet.csl.sri.com (Bob Riemenschneider) writes:
Actually Bob Riemenschneide wrote this, but I don't have that article.
>> e.g., you ended an Interlisp session by doing a SYSOUT,
>> effectively saving the image, not by saving the source code to be reloaded
>> later -- shouldn't be ignored. I think this encouraged a more
>> incremental, hackeresque view of the development process.
I wish you did end interlisp sessions that way. I usually ended them
in whatever the remote debugger was, trying to rescue days of work by
grovelling through the VM of the dead Lisp after it fell over because
I made some tiny error. I still have nightmares after all these years
about mouse cursors changing to little 4-digit numbers -- I can almost
remember what the damn codes meant! In-core editors are great if your
system is *extremely* stable, but Interlisp on dmachines was not, and
quite apart from the HW flakiness and bugs peculiar to them, no lisp
implementation I know of has the kinds of features you need to be
robust enough for this. Even Symbolics machines, which were an
order-of-magnitude more stable, and had file-based editing,
occasionally fall in a heap leaving you with lots of unsaved buffers
and a bad feeling about the whole idea. The 200+-day uptimes I see on
modern Unix machines are much to be desired (if only emacs would stay
up that long).
--tim