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From: kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)
Subject: Re: System Calls
Date: 1998/12/29
Message-ID: <1998Dec29.144631.1@eisner>#1/1
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References: <3677F2B6.FDC20000@gla.ecoledoc.lip6.fr>
 <7598nc$5lg$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36793CF7.6795AA80@gla.ecoledoc.lip6.fr>
 <75bsm6$ccl$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <75tmgp$bjf@top.mitre.org>
 <75tv4m$vmm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <1998Dec24.140342.1@eisner>
 <760dhr$pbs$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <76ai9b$ion5@news.kvaerner.com>
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-12-29T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

In article <76ai9b$ion5@news.kvaerner.com>, "Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.no> writes:
> 
> dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote >
>>Yes but the original questioner excluded VMS, and that
>>is perfectly reasonable, a package that covers Unix and
>>NT (and OS/2 and Win95 without extra effort) is still very
>>useful to most people. The VMS user community is a small
>>sliver, and while it is nice to include VMS where possible
>>(as is done for example in GNAT.OS_Lib) it would be a
>>mistake to let the idiosyncrasies of VMS impede progress
>>here!
> 
> 
> I don't think there is a particular need to exclude anybody. Most OSes has
> similar semantics with regards to drives, directories and file names. The
> problem is that syntax is different.

No, the VMS semantics for file versions do not particularly match
any other file system, and they are crucial to the VMS experience.

For that matter, the semantics for secondary appearances ofa
single file seem to vary from OS to OS (alias, soft links,
and hard links are some of the names I have heard).

Or consider that Macintosh files have a second fork, called a
"resource fork" which is crucial to proper programming.  Who
else has that ?  Why Windows NT, which can have _many_ additional
forks using the NTFS file system.

Let us not have the hallmark of an Ada program be that it is
"least common denominator" when it comes to OS features. Ada
may be a lovely language, but it cannot take all the work out
of programming.

Larry Kilgallen