[Oberon] A4 ? was: Re (2): Oberon Digest, Vol 104, Issue 2

[Jack Johnson]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 9:29 AM, eas lab <lab.eas at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, I see AOS as the equivalent to the linux-kernel in the linux/GNU
> combination.  Where small, ... multi-core environment is an issue, I
> have no doubt that it's as excellent as other Wirth influenced products.
> We, however operate much closer to the 'human interface'.
>
> As an example the simple 'task-loop' of ETHO was no problem,
> but the fact that the default-font failed to distinguish between
> "-" & "_" [WOA! it's still broken on LEO] means that EVERY
> new user, and old ones too, had failures for manually entered URLs.
>

I think another distinction between multithreaded vs task-loop behavior is
the OS vs human attention timeslice, right? Under the simple task-loop,
things like network behavior were inherently tricky to juggle -- do you
force the user to wait indefinitely for the FTP download to complete, or do
you slice it up to allow continuation of other tasks and potentially risk
losing the transfer via some future threadhog?

What's nice about AOS as a system is that if you prefer how ETHO behaves
you can live in a System 3 environment (heck, you could probably construct
a V4 environment if that suited you), and allow a natural interface to a
lower-level of the OS that might want or need to interact with the rest of
the planet with a different synchronicity, allowing some kind of blend of
an atomic user interaction with a multifaceted running process. You cast
your line into the river, but the river continues to flow dynamically. And
then, if you ever find yourself having to build your own irrigation ditch,
you have some sane and familiar tools to do so.

-Jack
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