5 Dec
2003
5 Dec
'03
6:50 p.m.
This has been done, and to an even greater extreme: check out
www.eros-os.org. That project represents an operating system radically
different from the ones commonly found now. There is no file system in
the traditional sense: the operating system uses the disk as a
persistant object store, with checkpointing areas: the entire system
state is written to disk from time to time, so that in the event of a
power failure (for example), the system comes back up with the same
programs doing the same things that they were doing at the time of the
last checkpoint; minimal work is lost, and this is done transparently
from the perspective of the programs.
--- "Andrew \"Silver Blade\" Greenwood"
<lists(a)silverblade.co.uk>
wrote:
A recent discussion with ROS_Guy on IRC prompted me to
start toying
with the
idea of a completely object-oriented system.
I implemented a few test classes, and it was written in a combination
of C
and C++ (the main interface was C.) Basically you'd have objects and
classes, as with OO programming.
However, the difference here is that files would be object instances,
and to
use a file you'd just "import" the object. The system would then
automatically load the file handler for that object. By default, a
"class"
handler allows special DLLs to be loaded that contain a class
definition
(not in the C++ sense - it was a table of action names with
addresses). In
effect, a class in this case would've been an instance to begin with
(an
instance of the CLASS object.)
Anyway, the basic outcome was to be that you could effectively say "I
want
to open this database" and it'd find the database object (say,
database.mdb), and then find the class type based on the extension
(and
maybe a few other parameters - like functions within it, as some apps
share
extension types, I've noticed.) This class would then be instantiated
in a
special way which would effectively subclass it.
This would result in a standard interface to the data within the
file, as
you could use the methods presented by the file handling class to
manipulate
the file.
To take another example, WAV MP3 OGG etc... All audio formats. All
could
have a common interface, so any program could read from and write to
these
files seamlessly, and the handler would handle the
compression/decompression.
And to take things even further, a polymorphic file system could be
employed. By that, I mean a file system that could change the file
types
"on-the-fly". So if you go to view all WAV files, you'll see WAV
versions of
your MP3s for example.
"Won't this take a lot of time and disk space?" I hear you ask...
Well, no.
The files wouldn't actually *be* files... They'd just be records
pointing to
the same piece of data on disk (the actual original file), with some
information about the file, such as the original format, and what
kind of
file it is (eg: media/audio/wave.) Then, when an application accesses
the
file as a different type, it gets converted on-the-fly.
While this isn't really useful for WAV->MP3->WAV situations (eg,
opening an
MP3 in a sound editor, from what was originally a WAV file), it is
more
useful in the sense you could open an MP3 in Sound Recorder, as a WAV
file!
And, with the correct file handlers, you could maybe open a Word
document in
Notepad (with a lot of filtering of graphics, etc. obviously) or
maybe even
open emails in Notepad.
I experimented with these ideas, and came up with a half-hearted
effort that
sort of worked but had a lot of limitations and was quite a kludge.
However,
should it be implemented properly (even just as a file system idea
and not a
complete OO system), I think it could go far.
A similar idea I had for the OO system was to have a socket handler
for
networking, too. So you could write an IM client that uses say, the
MSN
Messenger protocol handler, and that handler would have an identical
(or
near-identical) interface to the ICQ handler.
Maybe this would be something to look into?
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=====
=======
Frank D. Engel, Jr.
Modify the equilibrium of the vertically-oriented particle decelerator to result in the
reestablishment of its resistance to counterproductive atmospheric penetration.
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