Re: Platform portable support of heir. file systems

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <32BC1A02.3DAA@online.no>, "Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei@online.no> writes:

> IBM mainframes have disks and directories if my memory serves me
> right. The main difference is that the number of levels in the file
> hiarchy is one (or was it two). One could simulate more levels, but it might
> not be worth the effort.

If that is the mapping you would propose for DASD,
how would you handle partitioned data sets ?

Also note that a lot of existing MVS data is quite dependent
upon the hardware support for variable length disk records.
This seems quite at odds  with the "stream of bytes" view
someone advocated earlier in this thread.

Even though we might all _wish_ there was an easy answer,
wishing does not make it so.  Posix provides an approach
for those running under Unix-emulating subsystems, including
MVS Open Edition, but it does not provide transparent access
to the bulk of existing data on non-Unix systems. I do not
mean to slight the Posix committee(s), some tasks are just
too hard.

Larry Kilgallen