New FileSystem

Craig Latta craig at netjam.org
Fri Dec 17 17:41:54 UTC 2004


	(I'm sending this again as a new thread, just in case people with
threaded readers might have missed it the first time when it was in a
subthread.)


Hi all--

        Russell writes:

> My plan is to have nearly everything written in Squeak with very
> basic primitives, that way it allows more control...

        David writes:

> If you're going to do a complete rewrite, it would also be good to
> generalize the notion of an I/O channel for files, sockets, pipes,
> or whatever other external resources can be modeled in this way.

        I've done this with Flow ( http://netjam.org/flow ). I
originally wrote it in 1997, first released it in 1998, and have been
trying to get it into Squeak ever since, without much success. :)  I've
also spoken with both of you about it before, so I'm a little surprised
it hasn't been mentioned in this conversation before now (not upset,
just a little surprised :). I'm especially surprised that Tim didn't
mention it, since he sat next to me while I implemented most of the MIDI
support. :)

        While Flow hasn't been widely adopted yet, it has had some
influence, e.g., on the "network rewrite" that Michael Rueger did,
distinguishing streams from their resources.

        The current release features support for writing socket-based
clients and servers, and for using files, speech synthesis and
recognition, serial ports, and parallel ports. I've also written (but
not yet released) support for bidirectional streams on MIDI ports, which
I have found to be a lot of more convenient interface than the standard
one. I'm also working on support for digital audio, firewire, USB and
IR.

        Flow is used by Squat ( http://netjam.org/squat ), a minimal
Squeak system (minimal snapshot, minimal virtual machine, and module
system using live peer-to-peer negotiation). The current release of
Squat has a complete URI implementation with tests, written by asparagi.

        For the record, I've mentioned all of this on this mailing list
(squeak-dev) multiple times. :)  I was holding off a little this week
because I'm in the middle of renaming Squat to "Spoon", and I didn't
want to cause any unnecessary confusion. 'Sorry if I've been too quiet,
I've been working hard on this stuff instead of writing email... I guess
one needs to say *something* to the list at least every few weeks, just
so people still think you're alive. :)


        thanks!

-C

p.s.

        Russell, I've made encouraging noises about your Ogg
implementation before, albeit on the the Squeak IRC channel and not on
the squeak-dev list. :)  Good work! While I'm at it... thanks, David,
for CommandShell; I use it frequently. :)

--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
craig at netjam.org
www.netjam.org
[|] Proceed for Truth!




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