From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <60188231e88be692c8e5faf7a5dc308b@terzarima.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: everything is a directory
From: Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net>
Date: Mon,  3 Sep 2007 12:03:08 +0100
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> Unix already made the
> change a couple of decades ago.

plan 9's definition of read on a directory, and the definition of the data
thereby returned, is different from Unix's and there was no
need to make a change.  for instance, the data returned is unrelated
to any underlying storage structure, which is just as well, because it's
usually just some data structures in a program.

actually, since Unix's data from reading a directory was essentially a sequence of (ino, name) tuples,
that independence might have been true of Unix as well, but previously-used slots
were revealed, and the names were fixed length, because it really was just the data read
from the disc representation.