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Please actually try researching the concepts and papers about Plan 9 and Inferno before making such sophomoric statements as "A local file is not the same thing
by vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Please actually try researching the concepts and papers about Plan 9 and Inferno before making such sophomoric statements as "A local file is not the same thing as a remote file." As if no one has thought about this before.
- agumonkey 11y agoAs 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.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoWhich is the point. Files may be synthetic references to resources and not actual on-disk files, it's a general abstraction.
- agumonkey 11y agoIt's just a vocabulary thing, `file` is not that generic.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoYes, 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.
- typedweb 11y agoA file is an object that supports the methods open(), read(), write(), and a few others. That's about a generic as you can get.
- agumonkey 11y agoIf 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.
- EdwardCoffin 11y agoAre 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.