Re: "everything is a file" and beyond

>The only substantial difference I can think of between XML and filesystem
>plus "stat" attributes is that order of child elements is significant. Thus,
>the interface could be handled just like a filesystem except with the
>addition of an order operator (e.g., [n] as in XPath).

This implicitly accepts that the goal is to be expressively comparable
to XML. I don't see why that should be accepted as a goal? Both Plan9
and VSTa have become fully functional systems using only filesystem
semantics. Remember, the goal of VSTa is not to do everything everyone
else can do, but to do just those things which make sense, and do them
in a way which minimizes the number of architectural constructs and thus
(hopefully) maximizes implementation elegance.

Andy
Received on 26 Feb 2004 19:50:06 GMT