From: "Dan Cross" <crossd@gmail.com>
To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@9fans.net>
Subject: Re: [9fans] a question of file and the history of magic
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:21:50 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <aa7e41150807110921g1969b079q8988457fc6563b16@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1215421127.8591.3.camel@Nokia-N810-22-8>
I know! We need dynamically loadable shared object files and a new
language to describe all the things that file can do, and then a
compiler for that language that generates shared objects that are
dynamically loaded at runtime....
Oh, wait.
But seriously (yes, Virginia, for the humor impaired, that *was* a
joke...) there are benefits to external description files. Somewhat
obviously, it's the whole "little language" concept that we all know
and love, and we all know that, but the question becomes, for
something like "file", how complex does one make that little language?
At what point does the tradeoff between complexity of the description
language and hand-coded C break in favor of one versus the other? How
often are we updating things? And that *is* a legitimate question,
and I think it's the basis of the original question.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2008-07-11 16:21 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2008-07-07 8:58 Harri Haataja
2008-07-11 16:21 ` Dan Cross [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2008-07-06 23:45 geoff
2008-07-06 21:20 erik quanstrom
2008-07-06 21:59 ` Brantley Coile
2008-07-06 22:31 ` Bakul Shah
2008-07-06 22:44 ` Charles Forsyth
2008-07-06 19:30 erik quanstrom
2008-07-06 21:00 ` Jeff Sickel
2008-07-06 18:16 Jeff Sickel
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