Scott Robison wrote:
On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Richard Hipp <d...@sqlite.org> wrote:
Decades ago, files came in all kinds of varieties and permutations.
Details varied from one OS to the next. But it was common to have a
distinction between text files and binary files (with different APIs for
accessing each.) It was also common to have a difference between "ordinary
files" (that had to be read sequentially from beginning to end) and
"random-access files", which supported operations similar to lseek().
(Once again, completely incompatible APIs existed for accessing each file
type.) With binary files, one often had to specify a "block size" which
was the increment in which the file was read and written. The block size
was typically a property of the file and could not be changed after the
file had been created. There were often restrictions on the permitted
values for block sizes. And you couldn't ask the operating system to tell
you whether a file was text or binary or sequential or random-access or
what its block-size was; you just had to know. And bewildering problems
resulted if you got it wrong.
And this was not true just of big expensive business class machines. At the
very least (and I suspect more) Commodore 8-bit DOS (which was embedded
within a smart drive with its very own dedicated CPU & RAM) supported
(essentially) sequential byte stream files (no random seeking for these!)
and random access record oriented files (where the record size was set at
file creation time). Man were those a pain in the backside to use.
Now imagine writing an ftp client (or server) for one of these. I wrote both
for an IBM mainframe, way back when. You had to trust the user to select the
appropriate record mode for the ftp transfer to succeed without just getting
garbage on the other end.
--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
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