Re: Lua Strengths/Weaknesses and usage info

[Gavin Wraith <gavin@...>]

On Sat 19 May, Christian Vogler wrote:

> > What about using poslib? POSIX has support for dealing with directories.
> 
> This is probably what we will do sooner or later. The one thing I
> don't like about it is that I think that this should be a
> operating-system-neutral abstraction on those OSs that support
> directories. POSIX is not as portable as it could be. 

Remember that some OSs not only have a 'filetype' attribute,
missing in Unix, DOS, etc, (i.e. not part of the file's name)
but also have different flavours of directory. 
RISC OS for example, has penny-plain directories
corresponding to the usual notion and also a twopence-coloured
kind, called an 'application' for packaging guess what. The
GUI treats them differently. It is a useful distinction. 
Theoretically the situation is even more complicated, because
RISC OS supports an abstraction called a 'filing-system',
whose instances can be user definable, to support filing-system 
independence of the user interface. In practice there are not more
than a dozen or so, because they are quite fiddly to create.

-- 
Gavin Wraith (gavin@wraith.u-net.com) or (gavinw@sussex.ac.uk)
Home page: http://www.wraith.u-net.com/