acme for X?

acme for X?

[Bill Trost]

[Sorry for the posting to multiple lists, but someone suggested this
would be the best place to look for an answer to my question.]

Does anyone know if there's been an implementation of acme for X?
Acme, you'll recall, is a "programming environment" (I guess that's
the right word) that Rob Pike implemented for Plan 9 and described in
a USENIX paper.  I've had a chance to play with it a bit under Plan 9,
and it's just an amazingly wonderful interface.

In any event, I'd be interested if anyone has, is, or was working on
such a thing.  I'd rather not have to try to implement it myself, but
if nothing materializes, I might just have to....

Re: acme for X?

[Doug Becker]

Not that Phil's response is in any way lacking (I had no idea of the
port of ALEF to UNIX), but I asked Rob the same question a couple of
weeks ago, and his response was that Acme is "pretty deeply wedded"
to concepts in Plan 9 that have no analog in UNIX.  (This seems fairly
obvious from the various papers.)

I too would love to see some sort of Acme under UNIX (or even Plan 9. :-)
Heck, just the general availability of Acme's ALEF source would be enough
to appease me for a few weeks... :-)

Re: acme for X?

[Scott Schwartz]

Anyone who is interested in acme should take a look at Oberon, the
system that inspired it.  Wirth has written a book and a number of
papers about it.  You can ftp it from neptune.inf.ethz.ch; they have
binaries for sparc and some other systems.

The system runs in an X window and more or less acts like that window
is the screen of a Ceres workstation.  It's a little like running
smalltalk---Oberon is its own user interface, programming language,
and operating system.  

Anyway, the system is amazingly efficient and elegant.  Everyone I've
shown it to has said "Wow.", so go check it out while we're waiting
for the next Plan 9 cd to arrive.

Re: acme for X?

[pete]

Scott says:

>Anyone who is interested in acme should take a look at Oberon, the
>system that inspired it.  Wirth has written a book and a number of
>papers about it.  You can ftp it from neptune.inf.ethz.ch; they have
>binaries for sparc and some other systems.

I'd agree with this -- Oberon is an interesting and very slick system which
is well worth investigating -- anything that manages to pack a GUI, word
processor, compiler, drawing program, mail tool, paint program, terminal
emulator and so on into a few meg is _very_ impressive..

>Anyway, the system is amazingly efficient and elegant.  Everyone I've
>shown it to has said "Wow.", so go check it out while we're waiting
>for the next Plan 9 cd to arrive.

Yes, Oberon is elegant, but not in the same way that Help and Acme are --
it's hard to create ``ad hoc'' tools in Oberon without a fair bit of
programming... It's a nice environment for building and documenting
Oberon programs but I wouldn't want to spend all day in it!

pete
--
 Peter Fenelon - Research Associate - High Integrity Systems Engineering Group,
 Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York, Y01 5DD +44 (0)904 433388
 EMAIL: pete@minster.york.ac.uk `There's no room for enigmas in built-up areas'