Classic programming

It was thus said that the Great Eric Christopherson once stated: I am to some degree, although I like to look at such langauges for ideas and not to use. I find K&R C (pre-ANSI) too horrible a language to use [1] but even in worse languages there are some neat (if also horrifying) ideas [2]. But I'm also interested in older software as well. One of my "when I get around to it" projects is playing with the Viola web browser [4]. Written in the early 90s, it *barely* compiles on a 32-bit Unix system and while it may compile on a 64-bit system, it's unrunnable [5]. It has a scripting language built in, but it is its own scripting language that is quite annoying to actually use. I've been trying to update the code so it will at least run on modern systems, and then next, replace the scripting language with something more reasonable. My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get custom system calls to use. And at the time, it ran SunOS binaries faster than SunOS on the same hardware. Incredible stuff. -spc (Today, Synthesis OS would be considered a JIT OS ... ) [1] #define bitblt(s,r,d,p,c) (*((void(*)())0x430d6))(s,r,d,p,c) Among other horrors ... [2] Like INRAC. And sadly, my own blog entry [3] on the language contains probably the most information about it on the web today. [3] http://boston.conman.org/2008/06/18.2 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW [5] Because integers and pointers will always be 32 bits right? [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/