Re: System Calls

[robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com]

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In article <76ai9b$ion5@news.kvaerner.com>,
  "Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen" <tarjei.jensen@kvaerner.no>
wrote:
>
> dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote >
> 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.

That's misleading. In the case of VMS, the file versions
add a completely new dimension, and require different
thinking. For example, an editor is expected to create a
new version of the file being edited, and leave the
original input file completely unchanged. This is quite
a different fundamental semantics from a normal unix style
editor. Version numbers on files are pervasive and need to
be thought through carefully. For example, if you change
the name of a file, does the version change? If you copy
a file, is the version number preserved? All such questions
have reasonable answers, but the questions themselves just
do not arise in the context of a unix style file system
without version numbers.

I am not saying that it is impossible to take this into
account in a general design, but saying that the issue is
purely syntactic misses the boat!

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