Groups > comp.lang.java.programmer > #9962

Re: A strange behaviour of a File property

From	Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject	Re: A strange behaviour of a File property
Date	2011-11-14 21:51 -0500
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<j9sk2u$f51$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	(5 earlier) <slrnjbu6hr.fvg.avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <j9n919$q0q$1@dont-email.me> <slrnjc0bd8.fvg.avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> <j9r4ec$n62$1@dont-email.me> <slrnjc2kgb.fvg.avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at>

Show all headers | View raw

On 11/14/2011 12:38 PM, Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
> [... concerning VMS ...]
>
> How recent was your porting activity? (months, years or decades?)

     My active involvement started in the late 1980's and continued
through the mid-1990's.  After I left the company in 1998, they
re-engaged me as an out-of-hours independent contractor to do yet
a little more maintenance work.  So I guess the time range was
between 1.5-2.5 decades ago.  VMS' development, of course, did not
end when my involvement with it ceased.

     Still, my principal point is not about support of "dinosaur
systems," but that even the most modern systems we know today will
eventually be dinosaurs.  The File class offers an abstraction,
which File.pathSeparatorChar promptly breaches: "Java refuses to
support any system whose file names do not consist of sequences
of component names separated by a single distinguished character."
Given that File offers ways to assemble and disassemble file names
without this knowledge, was exposing the knowledge a bright idea?
Is a programmer better off using that exposed implementation, or
sticking to the higher-level abstraction?

     <Falling into a prophetic trance>: The year 2014 will see the
introduction of a brand-new paradigm for thinking about persistent
storage, one in which names cannot be so trivially encoded.  By 2017,
systems based on this new scheme will have swept away all the naive
file-naming notions of Unix, MS-DOS, VMS, AIX, and VM; even URI's
will be on their way out.  Will Java be part of the problem, or part
of the solution?

-- 
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid

Back to comp.lang.java.programmer | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar

Thread

A strange behaviour of a File property alelvb@inwind.it - 2011-11-11 05:45 -0800
  Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-11-11 07:34 -0800
    Re: A strange behaviour of a File property alelvb@inwind.it - 2011-11-11 09:28 -0800
      Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-11-11 14:17 -0800
        Re: A strange behaviour of a File property alelvb@inwind.it (Alexo) - 2011-11-12 15:04 +0100
          Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-12 09:15 -0500
            Re: A strange behaviour of a File property alelvb@inwind.it (Alexo) - 2011-11-12 16:17 +0100
              Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Zlatko Đurić <zladuric@gmail.com> - 2011-11-12 16:09 +0100
              Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-12 10:13 -0500
  Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-11 16:25 +0000
    Re: A strange behaviour of a File property alelvb@inwind.it - 2011-11-11 09:42 -0800
      Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-11 13:24 -0500
    Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-11-11 14:13 -0800
    Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-11 20:38 -0500
      Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-12 03:21 +0000
        Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-12 08:26 -0500
          Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-12 22:09 +0000
            Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-12 17:40 -0500
              Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-13 01:28 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-12 20:42 -0500
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-13 12:15 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-11-13 12:42 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-13 13:06 +0000
        Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-12 17:25 -0500
          Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-13 01:15 +0000
            Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-12 20:40 -0500
              Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-13 12:42 +0000
            Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-12 21:11 -0500
              Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-13 20:50 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-14 08:18 -0500
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-14 17:38 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-14 21:51 -0500
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-15 14:17 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-15 22:20 -0500
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Andreas Leitgeb <avl@gamma.logic.tuwien.ac.at> - 2011-11-16 12:14 +0000
                Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid> - 2011-11-16 08:10 -0500
      Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-11-11 19:46 -0800
      Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Owen Jacobson <angrybaldguy@gmail.com> - 2011-11-14 00:24 -0500
        Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-11-13 22:00 -0800
  Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-11-12 05:00 -0800
    Re: A strange behaviour of a File property Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-11-12 09:15 -0500

csiph-web