Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc Subject: Re: What is UNIX? Re: Is SUN a "PURE PLAYER" in window systems - SunView or OpenWindows?? Message-ID: Date: 8 Jan 90 17:37:39 GMT References: <.3ZB2Cxds13@ficc.uu.net> <9001021449.AA21356@super.super.org> <20997@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 31 > Personally, I don't see a simple unifying concept in NeWS either. What about PostScript? > I am also not convinced of your rule of system design. Complex tasks > are most often successfully tamed using a layered approach. Certainly. > I like > to think of networking protocols as a good example. TCP/IP is built > on a number of protocol layers each providing a higher level of > abstraction. Building TCP/IP from scratch is quite difficult and > error prone. But using it isn't. I guess I need to make this point clearer. Design the system to make simple things simple *for the users* of the system. In the case of a window system, there are two sets of users: the people who sit in front of he screen, and the people who program the applications. > This way, if > someone wants functionality that is not present at higher levels, > they can use lower levels to implement it. That's the second half... making the hard things possible. But you should start by making the easy things easy first. The way X is set up it's like (to get back to your TCP/IP example) putting all of NFS into every program on the system. You can certainly get the overhead down with shared libraries and such, but I hardly think you would claim that was a better design. -- _--_|\ Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . / \ Also or \_.--._/ v "Have you hugged your wolf today?" `-_-'