From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2012 17:17:16 +0200
From: tlaronde@polynum.com
To: lucio@proxima.alt.za,
	Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
Message-ID: <20120820151716.GA506@polynum.com>
References: <20120817064829.GA492@polynum.com>
	<9d1b6ae48845e39e92c877a80ab35fba@proxima.alt.za>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] Multi-dimensional filesystem
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On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 09:48:33AM +0200, Lucio De Re wrote:
>
> The question here is how to enhance the Unix-like hierarchical
> directory to embrace multi-dimensionality.  I have no doubt that the
> changes to 9P that will almost certainly be required for this will be
> fairly obvious and from there building synthetic fileservers will not
> be difficult.  I have a feeling that assuming that Plan 9 already has
> the required silver bullet is a bad starting point.

I don't assume that "everything is OK already" ;) But I assume what has
been (re-)discovered by modern mathematics: that the linearity is
fundamental, because it is the way we think. Mathematical language is
sequential linear, can speak about multidimensional objects without
being itself, lexicaly or syntactically, multidimensional (there have
been attempts, by Frege, and even in some early computer languages). So:
it is better to be sure that the core, kernel, whatever is agnostic
about the dimensions (making no assumptions about, for this, dot-dot),
than trying to inject multdimensional features in the core.

And one can play with the idea without changing 9P at the moment, just
to gather more informations.

--
        Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                      http://www.kergis.com/
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