Subject: RE: [hackers-il] Re: OS development

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 20:27:37 +0200

> I would like to check Scheme OS if you could point me to it. :)
> I would also like to get any info about it... btw, who wrote it?

Peleg,

This OS was never written.
It was a game and design idea for an operating system, using the Scheme
programming langauge.
It included some interesting ideas about memory managment, and file systems.

There is only one page of documentation, and it covers almost nothing:
http://www.iglu.org.il:8080/Zen/SchemeOS

Also, search the Hackers-il archives, you may find something there.
(But I doubt that, most of the discussion took place in a pub, late at
night, and I doubt if anyone took notes)

Hopefully, someone with better memory will have time to explain everything.

I'll also mention my old mistress, HURD operating system.
Its a unix-like, open-source, micro-kernel based operating system, which is
just starting to look usefull, and has good enough documentation to be
usefull for study.
I wasn't involved with it for more than a year now, but if you have any
questions about it, I can still help (I think).

For very interesting ideas, look into the EROS project, which is very
diffrent from everything else.

And if you have good and detailed documentation about the design of NT
(message passing, memory managment, file system) - I'd like to have that.

And if you need to borrow the classic Tanenbaum book, I think I have it
somewhere and can lend it.

Thanks,
Chen.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 21:01:18 -0000

> somewhere and can lend it.

Chen,
 
I thank you for the info and references, I'll go look at them now. 
About the book, it has allready been ordered and is probably stuck in 
the customs service. (only reasons for it to be 3 weeks late)

Could you please tell me what is the Scheme programming language?

Again, thank you very much for the info.
  Peleg.

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 05:24:07 +0300 (IDT)

> Could you please tell me what is the Scheme programming language?

Links:

http://www.google.com/search?q=scheme which in turn yields:

http://www.schemers.org/

and

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/scheme/

Now for my own summary: Scheme is a symbolic, high-level language similar
to LISP. Its main difference from other LISP variants is the fact that it
has lexical scoping (rather than dynamic scoping). Scheme was
orignally introduced as a tool for reasearch in Lambda Calculus, but since
then its usage has expanded a bit.

Many people in Hackers-IL (not including me) have Scheme as their
favourite language. However, most Scheme implementations are very hard to
do real work (e.g: that done with C, perl, python, etc.) with because they
lack bindings to many common operations. With a proper encompassing
standard, however, this situation may change.

I wrote a lecture about Scheme and Lambda Calculus for the Haifa Linux
Club:

http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/lecture/Lambda-Calculus/

(Disclaimer: it was highly criticized by Omer Mussaev, who is one of the
more knowledgable Schemers around us)

There are many similar texts on the web, some of which introduce only
Scheme.

I would not go into all that trouble to learn Scheme just in order to
understand what SchemeOS was all about. Learning Scheme, especially by
means of the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" book,
gives one many useful techniques and insights about programming. However,
I don't think it well help you with the OS essay, per ce.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

A more experienced programmer does not make less bugs. He just realizes
what went wrong more quickly.