On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 11:19:56AM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> >
> > Network paths would just be mapped to drive letters, which from
> > Squeak are: "(FileDirectory on: '') directoryNames"
> >
> > An agreed naming convention for the the drive letter assignments
> > and directory names may be all that's needed in many situations.
> 
> I thought drive letters are a thing of the past now? Isn't the Explorer 
> structure mapped to the file system? On MacOSX, for example, the 
> desktop folder is simply "$(HOME)/Desktop". Network shares can be found 
> at "/Network" (which is managed by the automounter). That means I can 
> access the shared folder on a remote Windows machine by simply pointing 
> my Squeak file list to "/Network/WORKGROUP/MACHINE/SharedDocs".
> 
> In case MS didn't make it so simple, maybe the Win32 directory 
> primitives could be extended to return the current list of available 
> network shares when given the directory "\\"? Because you can then 
> browse a remote machine by opening "\\MACHINE", right?

Yes, you're probably right. My Windows system here at home is pretty
old. But network shares still do get mapped to drive letters, and it's
common in multi-user situations to have people understand that "the
departmental shared files are on the Y drive" and so forth. So I'm
just guessing that for a setup like a classroom, it might be easy to
adopt a naming convention with a "drive letter" for the shared files.

If the machines in the classroom are resonably up to date, the
"/Network/..." naming convention is certainly easier to understand
and would be a better way to go. I'm assuming that the original
questions was based on setting up a classroom for kids, so the
simpler it is, the better.

Interesting off topic question: which naming convention is actually
easier for a kid to understand quickly, a "drive letter," or a
location in a directory tree? I have a hunch that the directory
tree concept makes sense to someone who has been using computers
for years, but might not be intuitive for someone using a computer
for the first time. And even further off topic, it's really interesting
to me to see how we tend to get so accustomed to ideas like "files"
and "directories" that we end up thinking that these are real things
that naturally occur in the world, rather than historical artifacts
of early attempts at designing operating systems. We get these ideas
so deeply burned into our brains that we end up expecting (for example)
that there should be a good cross-platform interface to file systems
on all operating systems, because in the back of our minds we think
that the files are real things that just happen to be connected to
different operating systems. My own brain is pretty well burned
in by this point, so it takes me a long time to recognize these
preconceptions (Squeak helps a lot with this). But I'll bet that
a kid will encounter these things with a much different set of
perceptions, for which my familiar metaphors of "files" and "directories"
would not be helpful.

Dave