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Date: Tue, 02 Jun 98 17:46:37 -0400
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From: Paul Abrahams <[e-mail]>
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In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]> (message from Gregg
    Townsend on Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:19:59 -0700)
Subject: Re: Directory access facilities
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>>>>> On Tue, 2 Jun 1998 09:19:59 -0700, Gregg Townsend <[e-mail]> said:

|Gregg> I'd prefer a simple built-in function that would generate the
|Gregg> names of the files contained in a directory, e.g.  contents(s)
|Gregg> with other mechanisms (if any) used for finding attributes.

I wonder how useful it is to have names of subdirectories intermingled
with names of files.  Gordon Peterson's point about the importance of
traversing the directory tree is worth considering.  For instance,
opening a directory might yield a set (or sequence) containing two kinds
of objects, subdirectories and files.  This is an approach I hadn't
thought about previously.

There have been a lot of elegant approaches to this problem suggested.
My own bias is for whatever is least controversial, on the grounds that
that's the one most likely to be implemented.  Clearly the level of
aesthetic sensitivity in this community is very high, so the risk of
ending up with a kludge is small.

Paul Abrahams