Filesystem design and operating system design is full of these kinds of questions. From Unix and Windows we are used that we can insert and delete the end of a

Filesystem design and operating system design is full of these kinds of questions. From Unix and Windows we are used that we can insert and delete the end of a file and that we can read, write and seek anywhere in the file, but a filesystem could potentially do much more: Inserting/deleting at the beginning or inserting/deleting in the middle. Deleting at the beginning of a file would be handy for queues or logs and inserting and deleting in the middle is a common operation for text editors. There are even more questions you could ask: - Why not have tabular files that allow indexed access? - Do we need hierarchical directories or do we need directories at all? - What about adding tags to files? - Why having a filesystem at all?