Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by agumonkey on Saturday July 04, 2015 @09:16AM
(#9830054)
As much as I love the way p9 modeled the world, I agree a tiny little bit about cwyers, in that the notion of file is stretched a little too thin. I do love the consistency but these aren't files anymore but namespaced objects, unless a file is a pipe `or` a register `or` a document `or` container of files.
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Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by vezzy-fnord on Saturday July 04, 2015 @09:23AM
(#9830067)
Which is the point. Files may be synthetic references to resources and not actual on-disk files, it's a general abstraction.
Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by agumonkey on Saturday July 04, 2015 @09:36AM
(#9830098)
It's just a vocabulary thing, `file` is not that generic.
Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by vezzy-fnord on Saturday July 04, 2015 @09:41AM
(#9830108)
Yes, it is. A file is just a representation of resources, nothing more. You can have files as a user convenience without even having a file system, but rather a persistent object store.
Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by typedweb on Saturday July 04, 2015 @12:29PM
(#9830632)
A file is an object that supports the methods open(), read(), write(), and a few others. That's about a generic as you can get.
Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by agumonkey on Saturday July 04, 2015 @01:09PM
(#9830768)
If I write <data> /dev/net/tcp can I read and get <data> back ?
Can I append <data> /dev/mouse ?
Sharing {open,read,write,close} interface, but with exception and different semantics leads to a weird flavour of genericity.
Re:Scheme 9 interpreter ported to Plan 9 (again)
by EdwardCoffin on Saturday July 04, 2015 @12:13PM
(#9830558)
Are you objecting to the _notion_ that is called a file in Plan 9, or to the fact that it is _called_ a file? I would regard the latter as just a synecdoche, using the name of the most well-known realization of that general concept to stand for all of the realizations of that concept.