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

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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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