Bert Freudenberg <bert at isg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> Oh dear. The Unix guys really have been far-sighted when they created (or
> maybe adopted) the single-rooted path name hierarchy. It's _so_ much
> simpler to use than everything else out there ... No wonder it was adopted
> for URLs, too.
I'd almost agree, thought there are interesting little issues like
cd'ing into a subdirectory that is actually a link and then innocently
doing 'cd ..' and not going back where you came from :-)

> Can't we just do the same? That is, use Unix/URL-like
> notation in the image and let the VM worry about mapping that to
> platform path names?
We (as in the Interval Squeakers) suggested this many years ago, even
offering our code. It worked very well for all the stuff we did and was
very thoroughly used on Mac, Acorn, Windows and MediaPad. Nobody seemed
to like the idea at the time.

I'd be quite happy to see it happen this time.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- They must have done a clean boot on him.