Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!MAILGW.CC.UMICH.EDU!rees From: rees@MAILGW.CC.UMICH.EDU (Jim Rees) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: How does ios_dir_$open work? Message-ID: <8808171351.AA03612@mailgw.cc.umich.edu> Date: 16 Aug 88 18:19:24 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: rees@caen.engin.umich.edu (Jim Rees) Organization: The Internet Lines: 18 Yet, you must admit that it seems a little strange that there is this call to simplify access to objects across a transparent file access mechanism and it does not work with local objects. After all, isn't the whole idea of transparent file access supposed to be that the application program can't tell whether or not the file is local? In the case of the IOS_DIR$OPEN call, the application must know beforehand that the object is NOT local! Transparent interfaces are always built on top of specific implementations. Ios_dir is intended to be the interface exported by the manager, not the interface used by applications to achieve transparency. When I'm writing an application, I don't use ios_dir. I use opendir(), chdir(), readdir(), closedir(), etc. These are the real manager-independent calls. Besides which, they give you portability to other Unix systems that don't have extensible streams. -------