🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear Vincent,

Experienced networkers at the faculty I work, told me that it is not
possible to 'download' the BSI drafts, therefore I would like to ask you
if you can e-mail them to me via uucp or bitnet (see adresses below).

About SI

Making your programs (or rather your collection of modules) portable, is
a problem in M-2 indeed. At this moment we started developing a huge
semantic database program (in M-2), which itself must be machine *AND*
operating system independant. This can be achieved by providing a 'virtual'
machine to client modules, containing I/O operations, etc. All real
machine dependance (and even operating system dependance: e.g. one can
define ones own file/directory structure on this virtual machine) can then
be confined to the (implementation) modules of this virtual machine, from
which the application modules import.
In order not to invent the wheel for the nnn-th time, I've been looking in
the literature for some articles. So far, I found the following:

1. BSI drafts.
2. YAML library of Robert Nagler: see net discussions.
2. Dotzel, G. 1986. A Modula-2 I/O Library Proposal.
       Journal of Pascal, Ada & Modula-2 5(2): 24-32.
3. Craig, J.M. et al. 1985. Design of a Modula-2 Standard Library.
       Journal of Pascal, Ada & Modula-2 4(2): 33-46.
4. Biagioni, E. et al. 1986. A Portable Operating System Interface and
       Utility Library. IEEE Software 3(6): 18-28.

I cannot judge about 1 and 2, but the OSSI-interface (4) seems to be the
best candidate for a standard interface so far, for it comes closest to
the virtual machine mentioned above. However, they do not give all defi-
nition module specifications. Machine dependencies, such as WORD/BYTE,
etc. have been taken seriously, consequently and uniformly into account.
Ports have been made to (OSSI itself is also very portable) VAX/VMS,
IBM-PC/MS-DOS, Mackintosh and Unix systems (according to the article in
1986) and the Lilith. Does anyone know, or are one of the authors on
this net, how I can reach E. Biagioni (Univ. of N. Carolina) or one of the
co-authors: K. Hinrichs (id.), G. Heiser (ETH Zurich) or Carlo Muller
(Brown Boveri Research Centre) ?

Lets get a standard for M-2, before we switch over to Oberon (or Oberon-2).

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TTTTTTTTTTT  UU       UU    Delft University of Technology
TTTTTTTTTTT  UU       UU
    TTT      UU       UU    Eric Maryniak, scientific programmer
    TTT      UU       UU
    TTT      UU       UU    bitnet address: wiors12@hdetud1
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    TTT      UU       UU      real address: Julianalaan 132
    TTT       UUUUUUUUU                     2628 BL Delft, The Netherlands

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