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> Being able to directly pass s-expressions between between programs without the format/parse/typing hokey-pokey of Unix and Windows would be nice. Genera did
by sedachv 10y ago
> Being able to directly pass s-expressions between between programs without the format/parse/typing hokey-pokey of Unix and Windows would be nice.
Genera did not have programs, it is all just function calls.
There was a multi-user LMI Lisp machine that ran Unix concurrently, that used streams to communicate between the two Lisp and one Unix processors: http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/lmi/LISP-MachinePR_Photo.pdf http://www.1000bit.it/ad/bro/lmi/LISP-MachinePR_Photo.pdf
Formats for inter-process communication are hard and far from a solved problem. Just look at what has come out in the past 10 years: Thrift, Protocol Buffers, Cap'n Proto, FlatBuffers, SBE, probably twice as many others I haven't heard of.
- jstewartmobile 10y agoHow about: Being able to directly pass s-expressions ... would be nicer than putting an alphabet soup of parameters on one program to have it output text in just the right way for the next program to re-parse it with another alphabet soup of parameters. I'm not saying that this is the one true way. I'm just agreeing with the article that there is a lot of room for improvement in how things get piped and config-ed in *nix.