[OT] Eternal programming

[Roman Suzi]

On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Michal Wallace wrote:

>On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Roman Suzi wrote:
>
>> I want to be 100% sure that some things I use today will stay forever.
>> My main concerns are:
>
>Hey Roman,
>
>You've got an interesting idea here.. But I'm not sure I understand
>the problem it's meant to address. If you're worried about your code
>suddenly ceasing to work, of course you know that code doesn't break
>unless you change things. A pyhon 0.1 script would work just fine
>today if you had python 0.1 installed.

No... Probably you have not understood.

Lets imagine you want to run a program 300 years from now. C compiler no
longer exists. Intel hardware sells no longer. No weird MS Word
files. Python 123.3.4 with almost anything changed compared with version
1.5.2 ;-)

What is left:

Data storage, 8 bit bytes, latin letters, 10 digits, some computers with
some formal programming languages, and some programmers ;-) who are
capable to program very simple core interpreter in the language they will
have at hands. (Even mathematicians will be enough).

So, after they program core interpreter according to specs, they will have
all Eternal software ready to run!

What I half-jokingly proposed is "do it yourself" core interpreter which
could interprete code written in some simple code, able to evolve like
Forth does.

AFAIK, there is nothing similar to Eternal apart from Turing machine or
basic math notation.

This way, the portability is utmost: you write simple core interpreter (~
RISC-processor) and you can run software!

And you have NO troubles of getting 300 years old hardware, CPU specs,
etc, etc - only data stored in 8-bit bytes + the only informal piece
missing: interpreter.

Can you see the root of the idea now?

Of course, only things of historical value will be done in Eternal:
* JPEG->ASCII convertor
* bzip2 decompressor
and so on.

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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