On Saturday 07 December 2002 12:57 pm, David T. Lewis wrote:
> Maybe I'm missing something here, but why does this need to be done
> in the various VMs? It's just as easy to implement path name
> translation logic in Smalltalk, so why not just do it in the image
> and keep the VM support code as simple as possible.  If performance
> is an issue, drop some primitives in later on, but by and large
> it's easier to maintain and distribute the code if it's in the
> image.

I'd agree with this. And I don't think performance is an issue here 
either (remember, we're dealing with file systems).

That said, though, there are enough differences between the various 
file system models that it's hard to offer all the services you might 
want without providing a few more primitives.

For instance, some file systems provide links of various kinds, but we 
don't have any easy way to get to them in the image.

Plus, we need to get rid of the assumption that there is a single set 
of file system naming rules for a given session (i.e. if this is 
win32, then ...). Even under Windows there are different file systems 
available with different rules about file name length, valid 
characters, case sensitivity and preservation, etc.

One symptom of this problem is that the Mac VM is doing path 
translations for the various kinds of file systems.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE