From: Simon Brooke
Subject: Re: In- and Out-of- core editors (was Re: Which one, Lisp or Scheme?)
Date: 
Message-ID: <5epd7l$1gk@caleddon.intelligent.co.uk>
In article <···············@staffa.aiai.ed.ac.uk>,
	Tim Bradshaw <···@aiai.ed.ac.uk> writes:
> * 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!

Yes, and the SETMAINTPANEL function you could use to change someone
else's maintenance panel number and thus convince them that *their*
machine had fallen over :-)

But seriously, (i) you are (IMHO) painting things blacker than they
were. Yes, you couldn't seriously expect a D-Machine to stay up more
than a fortnight (if I recall correctly, the garbage collector was
considerably less than perfect and you generally needed to restart at
least this often). But if you ran (SYSOUT) at the end of each day's
work you were generally all right. (ii) The remote debugger was
TELERAID, and I agree that if you needed to use it, you were probably
better off going home anyway.

> 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.

OK, this is (of course) a matter of opinion. I deny no-one the right to
theirs. Mine is that programmer productivity is so much enhanced by
in-core editing that it is worth putting up with the occasional loss of
work that a system crash represents - even on a system with D-Machine
style reliability.

> Even Symbolics machines, which were an
> order-of-magnitude more stable,

OK, show off, just 'cause you get to play with nicer machines than I
do... :-P

Regards to Gail and Jeff

Simon

-- 
·····@intelligent.co.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.intelligent.co.uk/~simon

	'Victories are not solutions.'
	;; John Hume, Northern Irish politician, on Radio Scotland 1/2/95