Am 12 Aug 2004 0:00 meinte Steve Thatcher:
I agree in all what Hans had to say except for how
data would be stored. This is supposed to be an archive
format which would in my view preclude getting data from
the outside world.
Well, a clear yes her ... and a no :)
Of course an achive of a media or a set of media has to
be cosistent and one pice - still it might be usefull to
split it up into several files (as someone already suggestes:
having format in one file and data in another, which can
even be a data file in Inel-Hex or whatever) which then
again are supposed to be handled together - e.g. in a
zip archive. After all, we're not reinventing the archiver
itself.
My only other concern as I have stated before was
that
data should not be an integral part of the media. If a
device happens to be a tape drive, the data on the tape
still separates into "file" type data and overhead data
required for the tape physical format.
Enbedding the "file" tyupe data inside of
the physical
format makes the data inaccessible without special knowledge.
Thanks for using the tape as example. Well, take a look at
the other mail... where would you put the header blocks ?
they are both, structure and data, since they where accessable
by the applications - If I open a tape file, I can go and
read only the data, but I may also access the headers. Even
more (at least on real computers *G*), a programm can write
it's own headers - there are even special user headers defined.
That was also one of the functions wicht made the PET special.
with a little additional programming, you could write application
specific header blocks, that where properly handled by the 'OS'
(read ignored :).
Gruss
H.
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