On November 9, 2005 3:15 PM C Y wrote: > ... the chicken-egg problem remains.
Why do you keep on insisting that it is a problem? At most it is a paradox to which we must consider a solution. To me it seems like you are arguing that chickens should not come from eggs but rather from some lower life form - maybe grow on trees? ;) Sorry for my poor attempt at humour ... > > I would like the capability to exist for someday, a thousand > years from now, someone with only the bare electronics and the > source code to be able to re-create a running system. I think the simplest way to achieve this would be through what is known as a byte-code interpreter: in the source code you include the machine code for the compiler but not the machine code for a real machine, but rather for a simpler abstract machine for which you also provide the complete documentation. Then the problem becomes first finding a way to simulate that abstract machine on whatever hardware you have available. Having done that, you load the provided abstract machine code and compile your first iteration of the compiler. The biological analogy seems to remain quite valid. The abstraction machine code is the chicken's dna. :) > Symbolics machines were actually very interesting in this > respect, since IIRC they actually DID implement Lisp at a > machine level, but they unfortunately didn't survive > commercially. Actually all of these machines used microcode to implement a lisp interpreter. Someone had to write the microcode and probably used a compiler. > ... There are a variety of [lisp] compilers that [are > bootstrapped] - cmucl and sbcl among them, IIRC, but I think > there has been some consideration of developing the possibility > of using clisp, which CAN be bootstrapped with gcc, to build > cmucl and sbcl. As you say, writing a lisp compiler in lisp is a very common strategy. I am sure the Axiom developers where aware of this. > > Basically, I think there is kind of a mantra that the fewer > bootstrapped software dependencies a system has, the better. As far as I am concerned that is only because these people do not understand the issue. Or perhaps it is because they are concerned with issues - such as security and recovery that are quite different than building the best language for a particular job. > No one denies gcc is such a dependency, but the introduction > of other such dependencies is not a popular idea, because of > the reliance of such systems on some available system being > able to run the original binary. That's an unpopular assumption, > just on principle. Stupid principle. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
