Self-interest January 2000

self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org

22 participants
21 discussions

Self on Linux/PPC?
by Robert Kelley 14 Jan '00

14 Jan '00

What would be involved in porting Self to Linux on the PowerPC platform? I have been interested in Self from the beginning and expect to be running Linux/PPC in the next few days. I have been lurking here for some time but now I see a potential to contribute.

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Corrupted download 4.1.1 for Mac?
by Ashley Ward 14 Jan '00

14 Jan '00

Hi... I've been trying to download Self for our new iMac DV (400MHz). I've tried twice now, but with no success - a little fustrating as the download takes over an hour. I can decode the .sea.bin file (both times I've tried the MacBinary version) into a .sea file, but then running the .sea file produces an "error -39". Turning the virus checker (Norton) off changes the error message produced to a "corrupted application" or similar message. Dragging the application to various decoders (StuffIt Expander 4.0.2 is the most recent I've tried, I think) gives various messages: some mention corrupted files, some are silent but do nothing. I thought this might be Internet Exploder making a mess somehow, but I've tried a similar process on UNIX - download either file using lynx, then use "mcvert" or even "macunpack" and I get a message such as: ashley@topaz 52 /var/tmp/Ash > mcvert Using_Self_mac.sea.bin Input file Using_Self_mac.sea.bin Warning: skipping legal but suspect line in hqx file -- line too short (1 < 12) Premature EOF while reading BinHex 4.0 Using_Self_mac.sea.bin last perror (may not be relevant): Error 0 mcvert: exiting This suggests to me that the file on the site may be corrupt, perhaps truncated? If I download the .hqx version instead (on UNIX), I can decode that, but then I end up with a .sea.bin file and the same problem above again. Can someone help? It would be really great to get this working. However, I'm not really a Mac file formats expert... Many thanks... Ash (currently at home with his new iMac :) -- Ashley Ward - Graduate Teaching Assistant - PhD year 2 ashley(a)dcs.warwick.ac.uk - http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ashley/ Room 102, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry

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A Self / BETA Language Hybrid Project
by Brian T. Rice 12 Jan '00

12 Jan '00

Hello all, I've been a silent member of this list for quite a while, but I've been highly interested in the advances of the Self programming language for quite some time. I wish the best of luck to the current porting projects happening right now. I'd like to announce a new programming language project called Slate (http://www.tunes.org/~water/slate-home.html) that attempts to take the best of the Self and BETA programming languages, and provide a coherent framework for these ideas. Although the language will primarily be dynamic in the style of Self, it will also extensively use the benefits of pattern-programming and the various abstractions that BETA has shown to be so useful. The language will also incorporate the abstract syntax tree (similar to Lisp's SEXP notation) structure and a functional character for its object semantics. This will allow for some cleaner semantics and better meta-programming facilities within the language itself than are available for other object-oriented languages. Finally, the language will follow the tradition of Smalltalk-80 by hosting its own interpreter system, compiler, and user-interface. In fact, we plan to implement a user interface consisting of direct manipulation of language patterns (a la Morphic) according to syntax and semantics adjustible through reflective programming. This will in fact form a language and environment that is programmable by visual gestures and representations alone. Well, I brought this to your attention as a modest request for feedback on the idea as well as to help identify interested parties. If you are interested, please contact me via e-mail, and I will be happy to send you more information and answer any questions you may have. We also invite people to assist in the development of the language and its environment. Currently, there is a partially complete prototype of the language system under Common Lisp, and plans include adapting the Squeak project's smalltalk virtual machine sources generated from smalltalk code to support Slate language primitives and the graphics system. As soon as we produce a language implementation that completely fulfills the language technical requirements, we plan on releasing the source code and environment under the GPL to open up development possibilities. Of course I welcome discussing the language's ideas and differences with the Self concepts openly on the list. Sincerely, Brian T. Rice email: water(a)tunes.org

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Re: Fascinating!
by Brian T. Rice 12 Jan '00

12 Jan '00

At 03:22 AM 1/12/00 -0800, you wrote: >Brian-- > >Very very interesting project! >Where are you physically located, and who is the "we" you refer to? > >How will you eat as you embark down this road (who pays the bills?) > >Just a few annoying practical questions, sorry! :-) You may feel like >sharing your answers with the entire self-interest group, I am sure they would like to know as well. > >--Randy Well, thank you, I tried to come up with an interesting, workable solution. Right now, computer science research is my second (night) job, so my income doesn't depend on this project. My interest in this is almost entirely voluntary. I do research in this way, and I find that various arbitrary constrainsts of academia can be avoided much more easily. As for my location, I live in downtown Seattle. The "we" happens to be the members of the Tunes project, particularly those who chat in #tunes on irc.openprojects.net IRC server. There are a few people I know personally who are unrelated to Tunes, yet have expressed willingness to code. Thanks for the interest, Brian

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Re: i386 Port: Status
by Dave Ungar 11 Jan '00

11 Jan '00

Gordon, Congrats on all the progress you have made! The trapdoor stuff was just an optimization for the PPC, which had limited branch spans. I would not use them on Intel, unless you can go within the zone much easier than you can get from the zone to an asm stub. As for the signal handler function, I'm not sure I understand what is in the VM vs. what your system is doing. BTW: I have put in some time today getting Self to run on 24-bit SPARC frame buffers. Fixed two bugs, but more remain. - Dave

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The Effort on Self
by Gordon Cichon 09 Jan '00

09 Jan '00

Hi all, I would like to suggest that we should get a more precisely defined focus on what our effort with Self is heading to. I would like to publicly ask the following question: What is our vision on Self? And: Can we do it together? Smalltalk started off with very similar goals than Self. It had the reputation of a very powerful but authistic platform. In Smalltalk, very litte have been done over the time to relieve this major disadvantage, while its advantages have been constantly adpoted into other systems like Java, C++ or Visual Basic. The result is that as the good ideas of Smalltalk got absorbed, and it did hardly evolve any further since 1980, it became virtually obsolete, IMHO. So, let's learn something from the past, and let's not make the same mistakes with Self again. We have to work more closely together. Let's not reinvent the wheel over and over again. We have currently nearly ten different implementation projects on Self, some of them are already running for more than five years, and we still do not have any tangible result besides the work of the Self group at Sunlabs. Let's get more focus, folks. Of course, everybody of us has a strong ego and wants to be the first one who rolls out the ultimate Self solution. What do we gain from that? If we are so good that we dare to implement Self on our own, would we not be much more successful if we join and work together? Gordon.

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Re: self-interest digest
by Mario Wolczko 08 Jan '00

08 Jan '00

Daniel Enting wrote: Well, Gordon Cichon and Mario Wolczko are on there way. That's news to me! -Mario

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Re: Self to PC portfest (was: sparc emulator (was: Mac Emulator?))
by Jecel Assumpcao Jr. 06 Jan '00

06 Jan '00

Daniel Enting wrote: > > P.S.: today is Jan 6 - how is that "Self to PC portfest" coming along? > > Well, Gordon Cichon and Mario Wolczko are on there way. Large supplies of Coke and Coffe are installed, Pizza delivery service is warned. > On Friday night or Saturday morning we will begin to rip out Gordon's i386 specific code from his Self 4.0 version and with David Ungars help over the net we will integrate it into Self 4.1.1. Good luck! Reinaldo Silveira sent me a private mail saying he ran the Self 4.1.1 sources through this documentation program: http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html He said the result was 24MB of HTML pages and class diagrams that make it much easier to get a handle on the source tree. Though I haven't seen it myself, yet, it would probably be a really good idea to try this out before getting down to the dirty work of rewriting code. -- Jecel

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Self to PC portfest (was: sparc emulator (was: Mac Emulator?))
by Daniel Enting 06 Jan '00

06 Jan '00

> P.S.: today is Jan 6 - how is that "Self to PC portfest" coming along? Well, Gordon Cichon and Mario Wolczko are on there way. Large supplies of Coke and Coffe are installed, Pizza delivery service is warned. On Friday night or Saturday morning we will begin to rip out Gordon's i386 specific code from his Self 4.0 version and with David Ungars help over the net we will integrate it into Self 4.1.1. Daniel

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Mac Emulator?
by John Ars 06 Jan '00

06 Jan '00

While I'm now the proud owner of a Sparc machine, I was wondering if those that don't have access to one, could simply run Self on a Wintendo (oops, I mean, Windows ;-) box running an emulator like Basilisk. Is this even possible?? Thanks, John

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Self-interest January 2000