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Nice to hear more from Terry, and to see that Mark has decided not to
unsubscribe after all! :)
Interesting, that the "connect" thread has moved (logically?) from communication
to filing. "Only connect" (E.M.Forster) - first, with other people and then,
with the info they have given you. I like the idea of Forth's
free/hierarchical structure being a middle way between filing as "heap of
papers on my desk" and filing as "putting things in little boxes".
Nick Maroudas
Quoting Terry Loveall <[email protected]>:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 22:12:28 -0500 (EST)
> Mark Slicker <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, Terry Loveall wrote:
> >
>snip>
> > >
> > > snip> .... Maybe an OS file structure is not needed but
> > > some form of 'filing' is. Unless you like sorting thru a heap on your
> > > desktop :-)
> > >
> >
> > Its funny, that is a literal description of my physical desktop. Heaps of
> > papers, no particular organization. I wonder if the inventer of file
> > system metaphor was a type of neat and orderly person, keen on
> > labeling things and puting them in containers. Perhaps he was user of
> > physical filling system.
>
> Nick here: My wife, Alice, uses that same fs: her heaps of papers. A very
good fs for Alice, because she has an excellent sense of time, so can soon
locate the "geological stratum" in which the required papers lie. Her father,
a succesful lawyer, used the same system, so the fs must be an example of a
cultural attribute being "inherited" because it suits a particular mental
heredity. And woe betide the maidservant (in the good old days) or the husband
(in modern times) who disturbed those strata by "tidying up".
I myself have no sense of time or place, so I am forced to "put
things into little boxes". But I do have a feel for "affinities", so a
semi-hierarchical linkage of words (Forth style) might be a good way for me to
group the labels on my little boxes.
>Terry again:
> Or it may be that the number of 'pages' got to be too large. Could you
> maintain that desktop if each stack held many thousands of pages and you
> needed access to it in different ways several times a day?
>
> > There are opportunities for the computer system to do the filling.
> > Some existing examples are email, where the emails are presented as they
> > are received in a temporal order.
> Nick again: Temporal order in her email, year after year, suits Alice just
fine.
>> Some email clients allow other
> > presentations like by sender, for example. This is similer to the example
> > you give above, with sorting files within a folder by different criteria.
> > (snip)
> > My critique of hierarchical file systems is that they put too much burden
> > on the user, to give each file a name and place within the hierarchy. ..
>
> Nick: You can say that again! I spend an awful lot of time sorting this CF
List into my little boxes labelled Terry, Mark, Tim, ... etc.
> (snip)
> Forth, with a nested vocabulary structure, can provide the basis for
> 'attribute typed' data storage. The basic managed 'physical' tree structure
> is
> provided by the vocabulary nesting.
> (snip)
> But all of the above could be applied to conventional OS design. See some of
> the recent write-ups on beOS. With colorForth, the opportunity is at hand to
> try it again.
>
> Regards,
> Terry Loveall
>
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