Re: System Calls

["Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.no>]

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. It is easy to create an intermediate
description of these things so that a program might reason about its
environment in a sensible manner. All that is needed is a translator to and
from that representation.

A sensible representation of the intermediate description would be something
like <length><tag><content> used recursively (at least if it is transmitted or
stored somewhere). Tagging items allows programs to disregard what they don't
know or care about. These items may be version number or some other file info
such as dates, last backup, protection, file type, etc.

Greetings,