On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 04:43:44PM +0200, Emile van Bergen wrote: [...]
> the Hurd's great central concept, namely that a *user* can run *normal > programs* to populate the filesystem namespace. (Or vice versa, that > users can use the filesystem namespace to interact with *normal > programs*). At least that's what I understand translators are all > about? This is probably much better-target at the help-hurd list, so maybe we should move this subthread there, but...: My understanding (which could be quite wrong--I've used and read translators, but not written any) was that translators were rather *abnormal* programs, and that trying to set a *normal* program as a translator on a file-system node would not give useful results. There is a *part* of every translator that shows through as a `normal program' (*sort-of* *almost* like how, say, Python-files can both be run as programs and loaded as libraries, I guess), and it seems like we'd all like to preserve this multifunctional behaviour..., but every side of the translator--every interface--is just -one aspect- of of something `larger', and it doesn't seem right to pigeon-hole the things.... Hm. I'm reminded of the `white mice' in the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which were just the partial projection into our reality of `pan-dimensional beings' :) -- "... many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing the creativity of programming." --Larry Wall -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
