Re: The illusion of simplicity and low cost in data design and computing

On Sun, Aug 14, 2022 at 7:22 AM Roger L Costello <[email protected]> wrote:

“Xerox PARC file-system designs grappled with this problem [whether to put
> file information inside or outside] as far back as the 1970s. They had an
> ‘open serialized’ call that returned a byte stream containing both
> attributes and content. If applied to a directory, it returned a
> serialization of the directory’s attributes plus the serialization of all
> the files in it. It is not clear that this approach has ever been
> bettered.” [“The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric Raymond, page 467.]
>

 That paragraph was one of my contributions to TAOUP when I was reviewing
it prior to publication.

>