A variant of the streams idea

[Jack Jansen]

Doug Gwyn states that files are completely different
from pipes/FIFOs/etc, in that a diskfile doesn't have
a data flow, like the others.

I agree on this, but there's a way to make a file look like
a stream: just say that your not talking to a *file*, but
to a *file server*. This way, you get your stream model
back. Now it's easy to insert modules that do ASCII-EBCDIC
conversion, sparse file handling, database lookups, even
readahead/writebehind, without modifying the basic low-level
file server.
There are great advantages to the file-server model:
- You don't pay for features you didn't ask for (ever heard
database people raving about unix readahead?)
- It's easier to maintain, since it consists of more, but smaller
modules.
- Remote filesystems come for (almost) free.

This is, by the way, the approach used in the Amoeba distributed
operating system, and in some other message-passing operating
systems. Hmm. Time to move to net.os?
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack at mcvax.UUCP
	The shell is my oyster.