From walburn at gmail.com  Sun Jul 24 22:03:38 2005
From: walburn at gmail.com (Rex Walburn)
Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 18:03:38 -0400
Subject: [movitz-devel] tips for a newbie
Message-ID: <792c6062050724150348622024@mail.gmail.com>

Hi 
I am a newbie to Lisp and have been a programmer of C , C++ and
assembly  for the past 2 years (i am not that old :) ...  I have been
learning Lisp using the CLISP interpreter on Linux and I came across
Movitz. So I thought, why not directly practice on a Lisp kernel. I
have some few questions on using the interpreter of Movitz and before
I ask them I wanted to know if there is some sort of user's guide to
Movitz.
So is there a user's guide for movitz? 
How do I access my hard disk using Movitz ? (I use Bochs to load the kernel )
Although I tried reading the archives of movtiz-devel mailing list , I
still could not figure out how to launch an emacs or any other editor
on the movitz kernel ?
 
These are a few basic questions I had. I realise that i could spend
time figuring it all out one day, but sooner or later, there are gonna
be more users who would want to quickly try out Movitz  and see how it
works, so I guess writing a small/quick User's guide is not a bad
idea. I don't mind even writing it for that matter, but  I need some
help myself :)
I browsed through the part of the code of Movitz which handles
assembly instructions, and although I could not understand some of the
stuff, but it's a  brilliant piece of work !! Kudos to all the
developers ...

Thanks.
Rex.


From jsmp at student.dei.uc.pt  Mon Jul 25 19:58:22 2005
From: jsmp at student.dei.uc.pt (jsmp at student.dei.uc.pt)
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2005 20:58:22 +0100
Subject: [movitz-devel] Requesting some tips
Message-ID: <1122321502.42e5445e39a40@mail.dei.uc.pt>


Hello.

I read and agree with Rex Walburn's email. Some kind of user guide sounds like a
great idea.

I used lisp in a AI course in my last college semester. We did not explore the
language very deeply. We covered the basics to be able to do some AI
programming in reactive agents, search agents, learning agents, genetic
programming, etc. So my knowledge of lisp is fairly limited.

Anyway I love the language and am always trying to think about fun things to do
in lisp. When someone told me about Movitz that gave me an idea. I would like
to do something memory managment related, schedulling, stuff like that, and
Movitz seems the perfect way to do so. To that purpose I need some pointers as
I honestly haven't the slightest idea where to begin.

Thank you.
JoseSantos


From jcrippen at gmail.com  Tue Jul 26 18:38:49 2005
From: jcrippen at gmail.com (James Crippen)
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 10:38:49 -0800
Subject: [movitz-devel] Requesting some tips
In-Reply-To: <1122321502.42e5445e39a40@mail.dei.uc.pt>
References: <1122321502.42e5445e39a40@mail.dei.uc.pt>
Message-ID: <caf8a68a050726113879a29c5c@mail.gmail.com>

On 25/07/05, jsmp at student.dei.uc.pt <jsmp at student.dei.uc.pt> wrote:
> I read and agree with Rex Walburn's email. Some kind of user guide sounds like a
> great idea.

I agree. However...
 
> I used lisp in a AI course in my last college semester. We did not explore the
> language very deeply. We covered the basics to be able to do some AI
> programming in reactive agents, search agents, learning agents, genetic
> programming, etc. So my knowledge of lisp is fairly limited.

Movitz is almost certainly *not* the best way to start exploring Lisp.
Not that it's poorly written or anything like that, it's just so
low-level that many tasks are tedious and difficult. And Movitz still
lacks support for much of the Common Lisp language, much less any
extensive user interfaces. It doesn't have a simple way to manage
files, lacks a graphical interface, has no support for anything beyond
the most basic hardware functionality, and has no applications of any
kind, not even a functioning text editor. (A working emacs may appear
in the not too distant future).

Exploring Lisp with Movitz will probably result in hours of
frustration as you encounter Common Lisp functionality which is still
unimplemented. You'll spend your time writing half-functional code to
do things which should be standard functions from the language. It's
like going on a pleasure hike only to find that you have to blaze your
own trail, cut trees, pull stumps, lay gravel, and build your own
bridges---too much like work. If you want to explore things with Lisp
I recommend instead working with one of the other free CL systems that
is in wide use. Don't forget about Movitz, but it's not a good place
to start with Lisp.

If you're still seriously interested in Movitz after my little lecture
then you should still spend some time hacking with and on another Lisp
system first. Experience with CLISP, CMUCL, SBCL, or any other good
Common Lisp implementation is necessary to understand what Movitz
still lacks in CL support. Studying these for implementation
techniques is important if you're interested in adding to Movitz's
runtime. Of particular value is understanding Lisp compilation
techniques, and extending the Movitz compiler to the point where it
can compile itself.

> Anyway I love the language and am always trying to think about fun things to do
> in lisp.

Check out http://www.cliki.net/ for many other interesting and fun Lispy things.

> When someone told me about Movitz that gave me an idea. I would like
> to do something memory managment related, schedulling, stuff like that, and
> Movitz seems the perfect way to do so. To that purpose I need some pointers as
> I honestly haven't the slightest idea where to begin.

Doing these sort of low level operating system programming jobs
requires quite a bit of knowledge of the hardware architecture as well
as an understanding of implementation techniques. If you're really
interested in this I recommend you spend some time reading through
Intel's hardware architecture documentation (they'll send you the
hardcopy books for free), then study the Movitz assembler and the
existing code. I've done the same, and still haven't gotten far enough
along to write anything contributable. Writing a guide for these sorts
of tasks is somewhat unrealistic, because it entails writing
documentation about the entire system, which is in any case a moving
target.

However, if you're really interested in learning how Movitz works and
want to see some documentation, why don't you study the source and
keep notes? Then you and others can easily build documentation from
that. Ask lots of questions on this list, and everyone will benefit
from the answers.


From ffjeld at common-lisp.net  Wed Jul 27 22:03:34 2005
From: ffjeld at common-lisp.net (Frode Vatvedt Fjeld)
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:03:34 +0200
Subject: [movitz-devel] Re: tips for a newbie
References: <792c6062050724150348622024@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <2h3bpz3o09.fsf@vserver.cs.uit.no>

Rex Walburn <walburn at gmail.com> writes:

> So is there a user's guide for movitz?

Sorry, nothing beyond what's available from the web-site. Which should
include some not-too-unreadable technical information, but not exactly
"user guide" as such.

> How do I access my hard disk using Movitz ? (I use Bochs to load the
> kernel ) Although I tried reading the archives of movtiz-devel
> mailing list , I still could not figure out how to launch an emacs
> or any other editor on the movitz kernel?

Lesson 1: There is in principle no "the Movitz kernel". Movitz is a
development platform upon which you can build OS kernels and similar
applications/systems. The "kernel" that I sometimes refer to as "los0"
is really just the bare minimums of a system that is used to test all
the bits and pieces.

To (literally) run emacs, you'd probably need to implement the
unix-like environment it needs. This is a big job. Convincing a proper
CL (emacs-like) editor to run on Movitz would be less of a deal
(google for "lice movitz" for something that's actually sort of almost
working).

> I browsed through the part of the code of Movitz which handles
> assembly instructions, and although I could not understand some of
> the stuff, but it's a brilliant piece of work !! Kudos to all the
> developers ...

On behalf of all the deveopers, thank you :) Unfortunately it's
impossible for me to take the time to write a user guide (now), but I
try my best to answer questions in this forum.

-- 
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld