On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 11:12:18PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
That sounds like the most, uh, powerful option. There probably would be no need to reverse engineer MacOS9 applications' expressive but quirky file structures.
BTW: the resource fork / data fork thing in original MacOS seems odd to we UNIX-types who think that a file is a bucket of bytes. But MacOS got a lot of leverage out of that thing. "ResEdit" was a wonder to behold. Essentially: the greatest common denominator for files in MacOS was much higher than in UNIX so generic tools could do much more.
What MacOS could do on a machine with 128k of RAM (including the video frame buffer) puts all mainstream GUI systems to shame. Part of this was accomplished by using shared representations, some of which lived in the resource fork.
Also putting the entire OS in ROM saves an awful lot of RAM.
That being said, I wish Linux didn't support forks. They make the file abstraction more complicated with very little benefit or use. The main benefit, as I understand it, is to embrace and extend NTFS.
Linux supports resource forks in filesystems? -- MLen Sorensen