A variant of the streams idea

[Greg Noel]

In article <2416 at ukma.UUCP> david at ukma.UUCP (David Herron, NPR Lover) writes:
>I just finished reading dmr's streams article from the BSTJ of last year,
> ....
>Could one use a variant of this to provide "funny" kinds of files?
>
>What I mean is, ISAM is merely a protocol for using a file, right?
>So to use a database "properly", open the file and push a <something>
>onto the file which does the indexing/etc.  And you would still
>be able to use the file in a "raw" mode for low-level patching, etc.

I spoke to DMR after he presented his paper and suggested something
similar.  In fact, if you look at it closely, a buffered filesystem is
just a specialized interface pushed on top of the raw filesystem.  I
would like to see the whole stream mechanism generalized so that I could
push a stream module in front of \any/ file, not just a tty file.  This
seems to be a simplification and unification of the concept of file
accessing, and Unix is renouned for the simplification and unification
of concepts, so why not?
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo    Greg at ncr-sd.UUCP or Greg at nosc.ARPA