Re: encapsulating directory operations

On Tue, 20 May 2025 22:26:57 -0400, James Kuyper wrote:

There is a practical barrier - while C was developed in the context of
Unix, which had a lot of influence on the design of C, that design has
also always been motivated by a desire to, among other things, be as
widely portable as possible.

Furthermore, back in that day, some OSes (like MS-DOS) were pretty limited
in their functionality, without even multi-tasking capability.

That situation has improved somewhat. Nowadays the world divides into
POSIX-like versus non-POSIX-like. With the latter trying to become more
POSIX-like over time.

The most different structure that I'm personally familiar with is
VMS, where the closest equivalent to a Unix directory was versioned.
If you specify a directory with a version number, you get that
version of that directory (if it exists); if you don't specify a
version, by default you get the latest version.

Only regular files were versioned; directories were files, but they were
specially managed by the OS, and they had to have the .DIR suffix and the
version number was always 1.