Re: [TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

For good reason. It's only useful to have a file-name _name_ for a thing if... the thing acts like a file - i.e. you can plug that file-name into other places you might use a file-name (e.g. '> {foo}' or 'ed <foo>', etc, etc). There is very little in the world of networking that acts like a file. Yes, you can go all hammer-nail, and use read() and write() to get data back and forth, and think that makes it a file - but it's not. For instance, files, as far as I know, generally don't have timeout semantics. Can the average application that deals with a file, deal reasonably with the fact that sometimes one gets half-way through the 'file' - and things stop working? And that's a _simple_ one. How does a file abstraction match to a multi-cast lossy (i.e. packets may be lost) datagram group? For another major point (and the list goes on, I just can't be bothered to go through it all), there's usually all sorts of other higher-level protocol in there, so only specialized applications can make use of it anyway. Look at HTTP: there's specialized syntax one has to spit out to say what file you want, and the HTML files you get back from that can generally only be usefully used in a browser. Etc, etc. Noel