squeak printing?
Alan Kay
Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Fri Feb 8 14:12:42 UTC 2002
I was just talking about a default convention, since essentially all
OS's have files, but only some of them (like Unix) have simple
process to process communication. For example, the Mac used to have a
similar convention at the user level. The default notion of printing
was just represented by a polymorphic command in the File pulldown.
This would always work for any document. If you wanted to specify
something special about printing you could go to the Chooser and
customize your printer. Now it's a little more complicated (and less
useful) in the default case on the Mac (I haven't tried OSX).
BTW, why would it be awkward to specify options for a pseudofile kind
of entity (even in Unix)? In the old days (even before Unix) one
would also use files for this. One file would hold the default
options (as text), and another (if not empty) would hold any special
options for the printer for special cases, etc.
Cheers,
Alan
-------
At 2:32 PM +0100 2/8/02, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Alan Kay wrote:
>
>> OK, why isn't the print spooler a pseudofile?
>
>IMHO, because it would be awkward to specify options for a pseudofile.
>Since on unix you can pipe the output of one program (your app) to the
>input of another program (the print spooler), it's as convenient as a
>pseudofile. You could in fact create a pseudofile ("named pipe") that
>looks like a file but connects to the spooler daemon.
>
>-- Bert
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