mapping files to objects

[Chris Hanson]

At 4:54 PM -0500 5/6/97, Kelly Murray wrote:
>If you want to write a Unix mail system in Lisp, then go ahead
>and write a UNIX mail system in Lisp,
>but that is not a Lisp mail system.

If you want to be compatible with the (possibly huge -- 75MB in my case)
mail you've saved over the years, you need to be able to handle the file
formats that mail is stored in.

I'm a Mac developer.  One thing that I've tried to be on Apple's ass about
since they dropped PowerTalk is delivering a new system-level messaging
architecture.  Such an architecture would have high-level concepts of
"messages" and "mail stores" that clients access, "service providers" that
do the low-level work of implementing mail store semantics on top of
existing file formats and protocols, and some sort of daemon & standard API
& configuration interface to tie it all together.

I'm sure the system cwg is designing will do something like this; he's just
concentrating right now on how to implement the service providers
themselves on top of his existing file formats &c, building it from the
bottom up.  Personally, I'd first define the set of operations that can be
performed on messages and mail stores, and design the rest of the system
from that, but everybody has their own style...