Dixie Language and Interpreter Issues
R. Stockton Gaines
U. S. C. Information Sciences Institute
4674 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey CA 90292
(gaines@isi.edu)
Abstract
Dixie (Distributed Internet Execution Environment) provides a base for
sending programs called Dixie applications to Internet sites for
execution. It provides the features generally found in operating
systems, such as a file system, multiprocessing, interprocess
communications, etc., and in addition capabilities to permit Dixie
applications to interact with resources at the local site. Security
is of first importance; it must not be possible for a Dixie
application to have an undesired effect on the local system. This
paper explains the Dixie concept and discusses language and execution
issues. The languages understood by Dixie, at least initially, will
fall in the class of Very High Level Languages, not the least because
these languages will support the security requirements of Dixie, as
well as the command language requirements. Dixie complements these
languages, and provides uniform platform independent of the local
hardware and operating systems to support Dixie application programs.
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