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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: System Calls
Date: 1998/12/29
Message-ID: <wccg19y8zti.fsf@world.std.com>#1/1
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Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
References: <3677F2B6.FDC20000@gla.ecoledoc.lip6.fr>
 <7598nc$5lg$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <36793CF7.6795AA80@gla.ecoledoc.lip6.fr>
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Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-12-29T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

dennison@telepath.com writes:

> The problem is in the little differences. Dos uses '\', where Unix and VMS
> use '/'. In Unix that '\' is quite liable to be used in the file name to
> escape special characters. In DOS, devices are at the front of the path with
> a ':'. In Unix devices are simply the first path or two in the filename. In
> Unix and VMS '::' can be used to indicate the machine owning the device in
> some circumstances. In Unix disks must be mounted before use. In DOS and
> Windows, they are generally automaticly detected.

The Symbolics Lisp machine had a pretty decent solution to these kinds
of problems.  They invented an abstraction that included pretty-much a
superset of all the bells and whistles on the various systems.  At least
part of the problem is pretty trivial -- I mean, "list of directory
names" is an abstraction that need not care about "/" vs "\".  Not all
of it's easy, but the Lisp Machine solution seemed pretty well thought
out to me at the time.

- Bob
-- 
Change robert to bob to get my real email address.  Sorry.