From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:23:20 EDT."
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Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:44:20 -0700
From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
Message-Id: <20120829024420.1B5C9B827@mail.bitblocks.com>
Subject: Re: [9fans] rc's shortcomings (new subject line)
Topicbox-Message-UUID: b3196e3a-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:23:20 EDT erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>  wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:39:06 EDT erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>  wr
> ote:
> > > > The feature I want is the ability to pass not just character
> > > > values in environment or pipes but arbitrary Scheme objects.
> > > > But that requires changes at the OS level (or mapping them
> > > > to/from strings, which is a waste if both sides can handle
> > > > structured objects).
> > >
> > > !?  the ability to pass typed records around is an idea that was
> > > tarred, feathered, drawn and quartered by unix.  files, and therefore
> > > streams, have no type.  they are byte streams.
> >
> > I was not talking about "records" but s-expressions.  "json"
> > is kind of sort of the same thing. Without a generally useful
> > and simple such mechanism, people end up devising their own.
> > The 9p format for instance. And go has typed channels.
>
> it sounds like you're saying 9p isn't useful.  .... i must be reading
> your post incorrectly.

9p is quite useful. But the same semantics could've been
implemented using a more universal but compact structured
format such as s-expr. It is not the only choice but to me it
seems to strike a reasonable balance (compared to bloaty XML
at one extreme, tightly packed binary structures at another,
and byte streams with printf/parse encode/decode at the third
extreme).