Very Computer

You have seen the movie? Could Modula-2 be used to design HAL?
Remember that this would involve remarkable progress in systems
design, robotics, and realtime application of AI. It would also
certainly involve some fault-tolerance mechanisms and various
data management and communications advances, but those strike
me as considerably-less-daunting challenges to such a project.

Remember that niether I nor many of the readers of this silly
line are necessarily terribly familiar with Modula-2. I have
heard recently that Modula-2's more popular than C in Europe,
that it can provide very nicely for advanced OOP programming,
that it has been used extensively for embedded systems, that
it will run on most any platform, and that its strict typing
and other restraining features are conducive to huge projects
in which "creative coding" as C allows could spell disaster.
Above all, the modularity seems well-suited to the challenge.

Well?

Quote:>Hello. I included these four newsgroups because I consider them
>likely bastions of experience and intelligence and because each
>might have a certain passing interest. Forgive the oddity of it.
>Please post discussions relevant to M2 to the M2 newsgroup, and
>PLEASE do NOT discuss things unrelated to Modula-2 therein. :)
>You have seen the movie? Could Modula-2 be used to design HAL?
>Remember that this would involve remarkable progress in systems
>design, robotics, and realtime application of AI. It would also
>certainly involve some fault-tolerance mechanisms and various
>data management and communications advances, but those strike
>me as considerably-less-daunting challenges to such a project.

The other question is, whether anything like HAL can be programmed at
all. If You read e.g. Hofstaedters (sp?) book "Goedel Escher Bach", he
comes to the conclusion that real intelligence cannot be programmed but
has to be learned. Therefore all You probably need is a "small" kernel
to manage the information and a HUGE information base.

But then ... I might be all wrong.
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| Josef Moellers                | c/o Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG  |