Re: [9fans] an idea

[Scott Schwartz <schwartz@bio.cse.psu.edu>]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 09:57:05AM +0200, Fco. J. Ballesteros wrote:
> But this could be done by arranging the the final clients to talk to the
> actual servers, without resorting to proxy places. But this would require
> changing the name space semantics. We do that for Plan B, but don't know
> how it would fit with Plan 9. To make it more clear what I mean,
> one way to do it would be to make all 9P servers become network addressable,
> then change the way the ns is printed so that a user could reproduce the
> ns from any other place in the network.

Without understanding all the details, it seems like that breaks a
feature of Plan 9, namely that namespaces work somewhat like lexical
scoping, where some things just plain aren't visible from the outside.
It seems like exporting a local name could be thought of somewhat like
a functional closure, where you'd have some opaque cookie to be shared
with friends that referred directly to the things in your scope, but that
you couldn't generate from outside the namespace.  If I recall correctly,
Amoeba did something like that.  Also, Prospero had some idea of closure,
but I can't remember how that actually worked.