the (ab)normality of translator-programs?
On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 04:43:44PM +0200, Emile van Bergen wrote:
[...]
> the Hurd's great central concept, namely that a *user* can run *normal
> programs* to populate the filesystem namespace. (Or vice versa, that
> users can use the filesystem namespace to interact with *normal
> programs*). At least that's what I understand translators are all
> about?
This is probably much better-target at the help-hurd list, so maybe we
should move this subthread there, but...:
My understanding (which could be quite wrong--I've used and read
translators, but not written any) was that translators were rather
*abnormal* programs, and that trying to set a *normal* program as a
translator on a file-system node would not give useful results.
There is a *part* of every translator that shows through as a `normal
program' (*sort-of* *almost* like how, say, Python-files can both be
run as programs and loaded as libraries, I guess), and it seems like
we'd all like to preserve this multifunctional behaviour..., but every
side of the translator--every interface--is just -one aspect- of of
something `larger', and it doesn't seem right to pigeon-hole the
things....
Hm. I'm reminded of the `white mice' in the Hitchiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, which were just the partial projection into our reality of
`pan-dimensional beings' :)
--
"... many computer scientists have fallen into the trap of trying to
define languages like George Orwell's Newspeak, in which it is
impossible to think bad thoughts. What they end up doing is killing
the creativity of programming." --Larry Wall
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