Re: Directory listings and path names

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net>]

On 22 Jan 2002, Stephen Leake wrote:
> Brian Rogoff <bpr@bpr.best.vwh.net> writes:
>
> > Surely, we can find many OSes which provide no tasking, some tasking,
> > sophisticated tasking, etc. I subscribe to the view that what goes in
> > a language versus what goes in an OS is rather arbitrary. The same is
> > true for language and library. Library design is language design.
>
> I don't think this is true. The tasking constructs in Ada _cannot_ be
> provided by an Ada package; they require compiler support. Thus they
> are fundamentally different from directory operations, which clearly
> _can_ be provided by a package.

Right, I was misleading. My point was simply that the services that an OS
provides are not fixed in stone, so arguing that one thing or another is
a language feature or an OS feature is pointless. The languages designers
should simply decide what goes into the language.

In any case, believe it or not, lots of people do concurrent programming
in languages without built-in tasking, and rely on library packages to
provide that support.

> This is separate from the question of whether a directory/file
> operations package should be part of the standard. I agree it would be
> nice, also hard. Perhaps a good compromise would be for all the Ada
> vendors to support the Florist POSIX bindings, on OS's where that is
> not too hard.

I think it would be very nice, and not too hard. The Python model works
well enough. Besides, Ada has this wonderful package mechanism, why not
use it to standardize bindings to Unix, Windows, Mac, VMS (see Larry, I
didn't forget you ;), etc? This being 2002, I expect any practical
programming language to have a built-in way to do this. I admit, I'm
Unix/Windows centric. However, the competition is tough, and we're really
talking about very basic functionality that is not being provided.

-- Brian