ansi c and directories

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <7100 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>And these depend on the existance of rare and expensive hardware. Any hosted
>implementation has a file system.

i've worked on enough strange o/s's that i can safely say the number of
operations common to all hosted implementations directories is the
empty set.

>If anyone's interected in the design of a wider "standard" environment,
>send mail to me and join the C-FUTURES mailing list. Let's fill the gap
>between ANSI and POSIX.

vm/cms file names don't include spaces, but have three parts.  ms/dos
file names do include spaces, but limit the type specifier to three
mono-case characters.  rt/11 has radix-50 file names packed into 6
bytes each with a very limited set of characters.  somehow i don't
think there is much room left in there for a standard.  oh - i forgot
about vax/vms where you get two parts, plus some strange directory name
format =and= version numbering that may make file names totally
ambiguous =and= you might even be able to squeeze a logical name,
dec-net node, disk device and probably even a moon-phase in for good
measure.

hell, my hp-41cv didn't even have a directory, i think.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                        +-Things you didn't want to know:------
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