Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!microsoft!w-colinp
From: w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: arp CD command change???
Message-ID: <731@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 24 Feb 89 07:41:18 GMT
References: <8902131846.AA21527@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> <3434@sugar.uu.net> <932@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: w-colinp@microsoft.uucp (Colin Plumb)
Organization: very little
Lines: 52

greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel) wrote:
> Obviously, this is a religious issue, but I think an even better syntax
> could be borrowed from MIT's Project Athena, where they have a problem of
> potentially thousands of file systems that can be attached.  The syntax
> could be:
>        ~dev/path/file
> that is, a device (or ASSIGN name) would have a leading squiggle, and the
> example would be equivalent to dev:path/file.

How is ~dev better than dev:?  The / vs. .. argument is independent.

I have a paper here that's relavent, although I don't know where it comes
from.  Page 563 of something.

"The Hideous Name" - Rob Pike & P.J. Weinberger, AT&T Bell Labs.

Quotes:

research!ucbvax@cmu-cs-pt.arpa:@CMU-ITC-LINUS:dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT
	-Carnegie-Mellon University mailer

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.
	- Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, II. ii. 20.

They talk about the things that go in the Unix file name space - files
(/u/colin/foo), devices (/dev/tty), processes (/proc/01234), faces
(/n/face/research/pjw), connections to other processes (/dev/pt/pt04),
and synonyms for other files (/dev/stdin).  The latter lets the programmer
forget about the - convention for file names.  The last 4 are new to
the Eighth Edition and more recent unices.

The problem with different syntax for differnt parts of a name is that
standard tools don't work so well.  And that you can easily create things
that are syntax errors.  E.g. on the IBIS remote file system on 4.2BSD
systems, you can use the ucbvax:file syntax.  Okay, now whose shell
can handle *:file?  The eighth edition uses /n/ucbvax/file, and so
/n/*/file is easy to understand.  Or what about ucbvax:kremvax:file?
Is this a syntax error, a request to talk to machine "ucbvax:kremvax", or
a request for forwarding?

They also roast RFC 822 and RFC 882 pretty thoroughly.  "No one pays any
attention to the standard as long as the software keeps delivering mail.
This means that a mail transmitting program in practice must understand the
details of local names outside its domain, to the extent that constructing a
network mailer is a research topic in heuristic programming."

I think the idea of mounting devices on each other is one of the great things
Unix brought to the world.
-- 
	-Colin (uunet!microsoft!w-colinp)

"Don't listen to me.  I never do."