Re: OOP Language for OS Development

["Alexander E. Kopilovich" <aek@VB1162.spb.edu>]

Thomas Gagn? wrote:

> was suggested by Alan Kay years ago: 
> <http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html#coda>
>
>    "Hardware is really just software crystallized early. It is there to
>    make program schemes run as efficiently as possible. But far too
>    often the hardware has been presented as a given and it is up to
>    software designers to make it appear reasonable. This has caused
>    low-level techniques and excessive optimization to hold back
>    progress in program design. As Bob Barton used to say: "Systems
>    programmers are high priests of a low cult."

The latter is certainly true, but crowds of low priests of several relatively
high cults constitute much more notorious problem.

>    "One way to think about progress in software is that a lot of it has
>    been about finding ways to /late-bind/, then waging campaigns to
>    convince manufacturers to build the ideas into hardware. Early
>    hardware had wired programs and parameters; random access memory was
>    a scheme to late-bind them. Looping and indexing used to be done by
>    address modification in storage; index registers were a way to
>    late-bind. Over the years software designers have found ways to
>    late-bind the locations of computations--this led to base/bounds
>    registers, segment relocation, page MMUs, migratory processes, and
>    so forth. Time-sharing was held back for years because it was
>    "inefficient"-- but the manufacturers wouldn't put MMUs on the
>    machines, universities had to do it themselves! Recursion late-binds
>    parameters to procedures, but it took years to get even rudimentary
>    stack mechanisms into CPUs. Most machines still have no support for
>    dynamic allocation and garbage collection and so forth. In short,
>    most hardware designs today are just re-optimizations of moribund
>    architectures."

Interesting quotation - it makes quite obvious that late/early binding is
a dynamic form of static notion of generalization/specialization.



Alexander Kopilovich                      aek@vib.usr.pu.ru
Saint-Petersburg
Russia