From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> From: Bakul Shah Subject: Re: [9fans] gcc on plan9 In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:17:51 PDT." <20060609191751.GE1693@submarine> Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 14:27:15 -0700 Message-Id: <20060609212715.AA129294C3@mail.bitblocks.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 64d16012-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Roman Shaposhnick wrote: > > Its rather simple, really, as an application developer my ideal world > would be the one where I can reuse useful components/services literally > in a manner of LEGO bricks. The world where a component that gives > me a "binary editor" capability would be equally easily accessible > from my debugger, my editor, the application I use to edit fonts, etc. > Ideally I shouldn't even care about where component resides or what > language/infrastructure it is implemented in. A SOA of sorts. > > Do we live in an ideal world ? Not really, but a before I state why > Plan 9 comes as close to it as one would hope to get, lets look at > some of the "proposed" solutions to this universal reusability > problem. Lisp machines/environments did this 25+ years ago. Everything is an s-expression is even more fun than everything is a file! Files are really like persistent global variables. Plan9 "files" are sort of like variables with getter/setter functions. But you still need lambdas (procedures) as glue. For a while I have wanted to graft Scheme as a system programming language on top of Plan9 (like system) but not badly enough.