At Friday 2003-08-15 14:03, you wrote:
I'd be interested to know what you perceive to be "the filesystem". It's clearly an abstract concept, but everyone seems to have assumptions about what it looks like. I suspect therein lies the current discussion."Victor A. Wagner, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>[deleted] That changes the physical file(s) associated with certain paths, just like deleting and creating files or creating symlinks. It does not change where those paths refer to in the filesystem.
Common English words (absolute, relative, root) are being bandied about and applied to something we all see differently ("the filesystem"). I'm told there are systems out there that don't have hierarchical file systems (CP/M anyone? or maybe the AS-400 ummm, whatever) and apparently even systems without files (why else the committee's instance of calling them headers, header files?).
For those who seem to think that a "filesystem" is a hierarchical collection of "files" with a single root (what I'm told that *NIX does), I point out that the language we're all so fond of (C++) rejected this single hierarchy for it's inheritance of classes (and I'm glad, I really don't like deriving everything from object). Perhaps we all need to merge our views of what constitutes a filesystem or descriptions of portions of it become almost meaningless).
I suggest that perhaps because everyone has such strong connotive meanings attached to words like relative, absolute, and root that we not use them in such a discussion.
I offer the word "anchor" to mean a named place in the "filesystem"
also the concept of "current directory" which should probably be shortened to "current"
paths then are either "from current" (no particular name for this) or "from some anchor" (anchored)
whether a filesystem must have a single "super anchor" or multiple ones I leave open for discussion, tho I'm strongly in favor of multiple anchors.
How all of this would be implemented should be irrelevant to the discussion (though whether it _can_ be implemented is surely a consideration)
a thought on the determination of whether a path is anchored or not: define a character that cannot be used in a path _except_ to denote an anchor (I suggest ':' because it is "almost" an anchor marker in MS (a:, c:, etc.) and was even more so in AmigaDOS (df0:, volID13735:, sourcefiles: (AmigaDOS allows you to make up your own anchor names and place them arbitrarily in its filesystem)).
-- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com
Victor A. Wagner Jr. http://rudbek.com The five most dangerous words in the English language: "There oughta be a law"
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