On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 07:27:48PM -0800, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> Daniel Vainsencher <danielv at netvision.net.il> is claimed by the authorities to have written:
> 
> > Maybe we should consider it again.
> > 
> > What were the issues raised back then?
> I honestly don't recall, but maybe some archive diving might provide the
> answers.
> 
> > Do the VM maintainers think this is reasonable functionality to require
> > of every new port?
> I suspect it would be reasonably easy to handle to/from conversions for
> most platforms. One nice aspectis that users are very familiar with
> seeing URLs these days so it probably wouldn;t even rasie any eyebrows.
> In fact since it is so common one might find the OS providing facilities
> to use URLs as file paths anyway. I'm pretty sure Acorn does, so surely
> all those advanced real OSs out there must do it?

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.

Dave