> From: Eric Christopherson
> people who like to program in languages or language implementations or
> libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use?
I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get
things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course,
if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than
same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc.
> From: Sean Conner
> My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an
> operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and
> specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and
get
> custom system calls to use.
> ...
> [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/
Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool.
Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...)
Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't
think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech
Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there.
As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't
enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus
inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did
some stuff.
There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it
could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc
- it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared
between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene
did that.
Noel
