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From: Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: A strange behaviour of a File property
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:20:09 -0500
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On 11/15/2011 9:17 AM, Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
> Eric Sosman<esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>  wrote:
>> On 11/14/2011 12:38 PM, Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
>>> [... concerning VMS ...]
>>> How recent was your porting activity? (months, years or decades?)
>> [ Answer: essentially last century ]
> Do you think, the same management would make
> that decisions again nowadays for nowadays'
> marketshare of VMS?

     Would they decide to sell product on one of the most popular
platforms in their ecosystem?  I hope so!

     Would they decide to drop a platform because it would mostly
disappear within, oh, sixty-plus financial quarters?  I hope not!

> Anyway, I agree that using the abstraction that File provides
> is principially better than doing one's own path-arithmetics.
> I also agree, that providing the pathSeparator impedes the
> abstraction.

> Sometimes, abstraction also gets into your way: how would you
> model a relative path that starts with going one or more levels
> up?

	File child = ...;
	File parent = child.getParent();
	File grandparent = parent.getParent();
	...

> I think to remember that MacOS (before 10) didn't have
> such a concept.  Did(/does) VMS?

     Can't answer for MacOS.  In VMS, sure: A file or directory was
either at the topmost level of its file system or it was contained
in a parent directory, and you could find the parent, and so on.

>>       <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?
>
> A very good argument.  I doubt, however, that even those using the
> current File API in the cleanest possible way, will necessarily be
> fit for those future filesystem changes.

     True: Java has lots of other built-in limitations that make it
unsuitable or at least uncomfortable for "advanced" (or even "large")
files.  I guess the Java answer is "We'll pretend the super-files are
databases and make you go through adapters to get at them ..."

     </smiley></rant> Oh, did I forget to open these?

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