Looks like everyone is trying to re-invent Plan 9. I think, however,
the `everything is a file' concept is not something we should
encourage. The metaphor simply doesn't work. The idea that you can
handle everything as a file would be nice if UNIX supported VMS-style
files containing typed data, but unfortunately it only supports files
as untyped bytestreams, making the file a highly sub-optimal thing
for everything to be.
The original idea behind this was that it should be possible to
interact with everything by sending it a stream of characters, be it
a printer, a screen or a file. Unfortunately, when things like
formatted text, sound, and graphics came along, it became necessary
to add all sorts of ioctls to get around the differences between the
behaviours of these objects, completely destroying the transparency
that was originally intended.
GNUstep provides a much more powerful interface by allowing
introspection on arbitrary objects.
+++End of Rant+++
On 22 Sep 2005, at 07:36, Jesse Ross wrote:
I've been finding some interesting things having to do with
filesystems that might be of interest to some of you:
http://del.icio.us/jesseross/filesystem
J.
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