Re: Platform portable support of heir. file systems

["Tarjei T. Jensen" <tarjei@online.no>]

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> 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.

I have said nothing yet of the datastream. However I think it would be
reasonable for Ada to support the concept of variable sized records on
architectures that have special support for it (IBM systems, VMS - there
must be more of them). However that should not be at the expense of
removing the existing support for "stream of byte". I think it would be
a good idea for those vendors who sell Ada implementations and their
customers to try to hammer out an annex that cover their needs.

> 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.

I think one should concentrate on one thing at a time. e.g. navigation
and simple file system maintenance. A standard way of navigating and
being able to reason about a file system is a big plus if you have to
keep a piece of software running on several architectures. Once this has
been done one can start to worry about other things. The point is to not
try to cover everything at once. Divide and conquer!

Greetings,


-- 
// Tarjei T. Jensen 
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