mapping files to objects

[Alaric B. Williams]

> Maybe I'm just overly fixated on a few screw cases that happen to be some of 
> the first cases that I'll want to deal with.  These are the cases that lead me 
> to want to find ways to declare the type of a particular file/directory.

Yes, this UNIXy filing madness seems to need a special resolving mechanism.
File extensions can do quite a bit of the work, with magic number checking
for hard cases (like - no extension!), and as the Final Fallback, such
as /directories/ that are really single objects (mail folders), have
a type-declarations file.

Have directories with extensions ever happened?
 
> All I really want is a better interface to Unix file systems so I can start 
> implementing routines that read such files.  If we can agree on an interface, 
> I'll probably throw together something minimal for my own use making lots of 
> assumptions and get started.  I can then replace my minimal stub with a real 
> implementation when there is one.  What I don't want is to just write code 
> like I would do in C (or did do in perl) that only sees files as streams of 
> bytes.

Yeah :-(

> Chris

ABW
--
Alaric B. Williams (alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk)

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