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000050_icon-group-sender _Tue Jun 2 09:05:15 1998.msg
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Received: from kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU (kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU [192.12.69.239])
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id AA07969; Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:05:08 -0700
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 98 22:45:58 -0400
Message-Id: <9806020245.AA0199@valinet.com>
From: Paul Abrahams <abrahams@acm.org>
To: ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz
Cc: icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Subject: Retrieving directory contents
Reply-To: abrahams@acm.org
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1236
>>>>> On Tue, 2 Jun 1998 13:29:00 +1200 (NZST), "Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@atlas.otago.ac.nz> said:
|Richard> A directory-with-file-attributes is NOT a sequence of text
|Richard> lines; it is NOT a sequence, and its elements are NOT lines of
|Richard> text. Icon has the notational resources to describe what a
|Richard> directory IS quite directly, and it would be a shame not to
|Richard> use them.
|Richard> What is a directory with attributes? It is a partial function
|Richard> from name strings to attributes.
|Richard> Something like
|Richard> directory(DirectoryNameString [,
|Richard> FilePatternWithWildCards]) -> table with strings as keys and
|Richard> attribute records as value
|Richard> would be the perfect fit to Icon. Generation can then be
|Richard> based on the existing key generation.
That certainly seems like a good approach - but I'd hate to see the
whole idea of system-independent directory processing lost because the
solution seems too elaborate or requires too much work. I'm concerned
about the best being the enemy of the good here. What I care about more
than anything else is seeing *some* system-independent method of
retrieving the names of the files in a given directory.
Paul Abrahams