tinySelf status 2

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel@lsi.usp.br>]

One frustration that some people had with tinySelf is that
they couldn't see what I was doing since I hadn't finished.
So I will now make a new version available on the net every
time I make any changes, no matter how raw it is.

Unfortunately, I have an even larger frustration in store
for potential tinySelf fans. I have stopped all work on
the version in C for Linux and have started using Self 4.0
as a development system instead. Since most people wanted
tinySelf because they had no access to Self, it may seem
cruel that the first few versions will run exactly on
Self! But this is just a temporary problem: as soon as
the X86 compiler is ready, tinySelf will be "ported" to
Linux (after that, it will also run in Win32 and directly
on the hardware). One improvement over previous plans is
that the Linux version will now always be supported
instead of being abandoned once the native hardware (OS)
version is released.

The first version of tinySelf will be just a trivial
scheduler to allow Self 4.0 to execute programs using
tinySelf's parallelism model. Running some benchmarks
on this will let us know just how compatible the two
models really are. You can get a copy as

  http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/ts1.self.gz

To execute an expression you type

  tinySelf eval: '3 _IntAdd: 4'

It only represents about two days' work, and at least two
days more are needed until it actually runs things
more interesting than the above. I will only be able to
continue this next Thursday, however, as the local
university will be closed due to Brazil's "Carnaval"
festival.

-- Jecel