Re: Ada Operating System

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Never said there weren't other OS's that didn't also make it difficult. But
perhaps we're also talking about something entirely different. We once
approached the issue of being able to get an arbitrary filename, open the
file as a stream of bytes, suck up the file & be able to spit it back out
again & have it be the same thing it once was. (It was a databasey kind of
thing.) The DEC guys strongly recommended we didn't attempt to do that.
After attempting to do so, we also came to that conclusion.

For all the sins of Unix at least it was possible to treat a file as a
stream of raw bytes when it was convenient to do so. (Not that you couldn't
have the files contain all sorts of interesting attributes & organizations -
just that all information needed should be copyable using a byte stream.)
That would be a capability I'd build into an OS if I was building one from
scratch.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Larry Kilgallen" <Kilgallen@SpamCop.net> wrote in message
news:YHWJXo5va3QF@eisner.encompasserve.org...
>
> So is it trivial to write a Copy command for partitioned data sets
> under MVS that works across an SNA network honoring wildcarded
> specifications ?
>
> I think even the current MacOS 9 "Copy" command is a bit complex,
> certainly running in the background and possibly even parallelizing
> its own work.
>
> "Copy" is a capability whose desired effect is obvious to the
> human but considerably difficult to implement in a pleasing fashion.