You need to define Operating System, and I defy you to come up with a definition
that would exclude languages. For --- sake BASIC is an Operating System!!!
There's lisp, as has been pointed out, there's Forth, there's Pick, ...
Basically, any language that has been / can be designed to run on "bare
metal" is an operating system. Looking at that list, they seem typically to
be interpreted languages...
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| I don't have to edit the Title box for my reply :)
There is a big difference
between an OS and a computer language. LISP is not an OS. The operating system
is the software that controls the underlying hardware of the computer, manages
the resources of the system such as memory, use of the cpus, data storage,
handles allocation of resources and access security, and so on. LISP does not do
any of that. Just because the Lisp Machine's hardware was designed to run LISP,
and most of the OS on the LispM was written in LISP, does not mean that LISP was
the OS. The Linux kernel is written in C, but that doesn't make C an operating
system. It doesn't even mean that the cpus that run Linux have C as their
instruction set. The Lisp Machines had a machine language which the LISP
compilers compiled to. It just happened to be a machine language quite different
from that of the standard machines of the time, a machine language designed to
provide instructions that would be useful as a target for LISP compilers.
By
the way, you must be mistaken about Franz Lisp on your Lisp computer. Franz Lisp
was written for the BSD Unix on the Vax to be an alternative to running LISP on
expensive Lisp machines. See the Wikipedia article on Franz Lisp for details, or
if you want a more primary source see the article at the Computer History Museum
Franz Lisp
If you were on the West Coast you probably were using
Interlisp-D on one of the Xerox D... machines (Dorado, Dolphin, Dandelion). Or
if you were East Coast, people there tended to use one of Lisp Machines that
came out of MIT via Lisp Machines Inc or Symbolics running Zetalisp.
I'm not
sure what you mean by the patents being Java oriented, but that could be that I
haven't spent enough time reading through the filings, and I'm not likely to. My
brain feels dirty just looking up the two OO OS patents that I did, 5,519,867
and 6,275,983.
The first patent comes out of Taligent. That is a company
that was spun off as a collaboration between Apple and IBM to develop an object
oriented operating system. They were coding in C++. The second patent was filed
five years after the first patent. I find it difficult to see the difference
between Claim 1 of the two patents. I also don't see how any application written
in an object-oriented language that has a run time environment on an ordinary
(procedural) operating system would not have all the elements of either Claim 1.
Certainly Java came first and covers all the elements of the claims. I couldn't
get through all 53 claims of the '867 but a skimming over them didn't reveal
anything not in a Lisp Machine, or maybe even in any Java implementation. The
second patent is even more of a joke, 22 claims of repetition adding almost
nothing to the Claim 1.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
