pathnames

[Stefan Bamberger]

At 18:25 Uhr 04.05.1997, Adam Alpern wrote:
>Luca Pisati [pisati@nichimen.com] sez:
>;; Probably most of pathname design in CL is good, but I do not fear
>;; to have to change in order to provide more independence from
>;; platform issues.
>[ ... ]
>;; One thing was far better on LispM than in ANSI CL was the total
>;; flexibility of pathnames. They where well defined structures,
>
>I'm afraid you have an advantage over me here - I've never had the
>pleasure of using a LispM. I'm in agreement here - I'm not averse to
>reworking them, I just think that we shouldn't go re-engineering
>pathnames. Make them more easily extensible to deal with new
>abstractions, to allow discontigous disks to look like one logical
>disk, make any program than knows how to talk pathnames be able to
>talk a new netwrok protocol by transparently extending the underlying
>objects.
>
>Now, building a new abstraction to deal with an OS which has no files,
>only persistent objects - that could be done from scratch.
>
>;; and extending them was incredibly trivial.  I actually did it a
>
>Amen. Everything should be extensible.
>
>;; I fully agree with these.  The only point is that ANSI-CL pathnames
>;; have probably to be twisted just a little bit, in order to do a
>;; better and seamless merging.
>
>Again, I think we're in agreement here.
>
>- Adam
>
>--
>Adam Alpern <alpern@brightware.com>
>http://www.brightware.com/~alpern/



I think the ANSI-CL pathnames  concept is powerful enough. What I would
like to have in the future is a better functional interface which has fewer
'implementation specific' parts in it.
For example,  a probe-directory in addition to probe-file (for those OS
which deal directories different from files) or what happens if I write to
a file where some parts of the directory aren't specified?
OK, in a 'new' OS we can mange all this things apropriately but if there
exists a sufficient interface porting and cross-platform developing will be
easier.

- stefan


______________________________________________________________________________
Stefan K. Bamberger                   email: bambi@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
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