> Unix already made the > change a couple of decades ago. plan 9's definition of read on a directory, and the definition of the data thereby returned, is different from Unix's and there was no need to make a change. for instance, the data returned is unrelated to any underlying storage structure, which is just as well, because it's usually just some data structures in a program.
actually, since Unix's data from reading a directory was essentially a sequence of (ino, name) tuples, that independence might have been true of Unix as well, but previously-used slots were revealed, and the names were fixed length, because it really was just the data read from the disc representation.
