Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Path: utzoo!utdoe!david
From: david@doe.utoronto.ca (David Megginson)
Subject: Re: New standards for MiNT programs?
Message-ID: <1991Mar19.160718.10270@doe.utoronto.ca>
Reply-To: david@doe.utoronto.ca (David Megginson)
Organization: Dictionary of Old English Project, University of Toronto
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1991 16:07:18 GMT


In <1991Mar19.105139.28070@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>, Howard Chu writes:
> In article <1991Mar19.150319.25547@qut.edu.au> lunnon@qut.edu.au writes:
> >Huh, why not use dirent ??? This seems reasonably capable and is portable
> >to boot ???
> 
> I'd agree, we should try to hide the Fsfirst/Fsnext layer completely and
> use the Unix *dir routines instead. (This seems reasonable, given MiNT's
> apparent intent to provide as much BSD functionality as possible...)
> -- 

Of course, the problem is that MiNT is still stuck with TOS, and TOS
does not support device drivers, so the drivers (for TOS and Minix)
are hard-coded into MiNT. I don't know a lot about the low-level mechanics
of Unix, but I think that directories are special files rather than
FAT entries, hence the different way of dealing with them (the library
emulates these directory files by caching return values from Fsfirst()/
Fsnext()). I'm sure that others here can add to this...


David



-- 
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/  David Megginson                      david@doe.utoronto.ca          /
/  Centre for Medieval Studies          meggin@vm.epas.utoronto.ca     /
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////