On Fri, 7 Apr 1995 09:28:16 -0700 (PDT), Tilak Ravi tilak@ecst.csuchico.edu wrote:

Yes! that is great having a m/c where we could telnet and see the demos for self.

I have been using Self in a text mode from home and can say it is very disapointing compared to the UI. Someone else ( sorry, I lost the message ) asked about running Self without the UI. It is easy - make sure the DISPLAY environment variable is not set up to a valid X server and call Self. It complains and asks if you want to abort, retry or continue without graphics. Choose the third option and there you are!

I there an existing port of self for linux. If not I would be glad to contribute to the effort.

Porting to Linux would be hard, but very worthwhile. You would have to rewrite the compiler to generate 386 code, but other than the register allocation I saw nothing there that is too Sparc dependent.

I am writting a small Self interpreter that will run initially on Linux, but it will be very slow and not totally compatible with normal Self. I doubt you will be able to run large programs ( like Mango or Cecil ) on it. It will also use svgalib rather than X windows. The second version will run on the bare 386 hardware, so I don't expect the Linux version to ever become very usable. I'll post it here so anyone who is brave enough will be able to try it out.

Regards -- Jecel