New (GNU) kernels--what I think

[Marcus Leech]

In article <1724 at auspex.auspex.com>, guy at auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
> 
> What do you mean "by name"?  Does "name" mean the name of the open file,
> or the name of the "who" (which means a process) that has the file open?
> The former isn't quite as easy as you seem to think....
I'm talking about "by filename" (relative to the current host).
Given the current structure of the UNIX kernel, and filesystem code,
  it is neither easy, nor cheap.  But the fact is that other systems do
  this sort of thing, apparently cheaply.  We are talking about a whole
  new structure for the kernel, and various subsystems within it.
  Thought ought to be given to instrumentation and administration issues.
> 
> 
> I hope "punctuation" includes blanks; maybe the UNIX shells make it
> 
> Furthermore, some "national character sets" include characters that are
> neither alphabetics, numbers, nor punctuation (can you say "Kanji"?).
What I was trying to convey was "whatever seems reasonable within the
  context of the current national character set".  See my followup to
  Doug Gwyns comments on my original posting.  The notion is that a
  filename with accents,valid-kanji-symbols,bizzarre-national-punctuation,etc
  is reasonable.  A filename that consists of control sequences meaningful
  only to a particular brand of terminal probably isn't.
> 
> I'd just trash most of the "user interface" features of the tty driver
> completely, and have people run their choice of user-mode front ends
> instead; cf. EMACS windows, the "ile" editor or whatever, etc..  This
That approach is only reasonable if the underlying driver allows
  character-at-a-time processing at user (library??) level to be
  done cheaply. Traditionally, this has been a problem, which
  is why there is user-interface stuff in the tty driver.
-- 
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Marcus Leech                             E-mail:     ml at gandalf.UUCP
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"The opinions expressed herein are solely my own" So there