the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3603

Very true, as I thought I had implied in the previous post.

But, but ....

In my previous post I included a reference to a 1968 plus 1 paper by Dijkstra describing the design of an operating system for an actual computer ("THE Multiprogramming System" -- "THE" being the Dutch initial for the Technical University of Eindhoven, where he was employed at the time). As near as I can tell from the paper and discussion on the Web, this design was in fact implemented.

I also included the following quotation from the paper:

"As captain of the crew I had had extensive experience (dating back to 1958) in making basic software dealing with real time interrupts and I knew by bitter experience that as a result of the irreproducibility of the interrupt moments, a program error could present itself misleadingly like an occasional machine malfunctioning."

Does this sound like someone whose experience is with theory only?

I'm quite willing to believe Dijkstra made mistakes, and I'm sure there were things he didn't do well, or at all. But I can't understand your insistence that he is not an "O-S thinker".

In searching around for more information about the THE operating system, I discovered that this was discussed previously in this group (October 2004, thread subject "Shipwrecks"), and someone even included a reference to that same paper I cited. In that thread, you asked whether the operating system he designed was for a time-sharing system. It probably was not, but the name alone suggests that it was for a system intended to run more than one batch process at a time, and the design mentions multiple processes. This to me says that he was able to deal with systems that don't follow the "compiler thinker" paradigm of "one thing at a time".

What criterion for "O-S thinker" does this guy fail to satisfy? I'm not trying to defend him, exactly; I'm just puzzled by what you keep saying.

snip

Replying to the rest in a separate post, since we seem to be talking about multiple different subjects here.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.