Unity and related topics

[mo]

Unity maps filenames in a way which uses the VMS names, but allows
full Unix transparency.  When a filename is allowable as a VMS filename,
it is used as-is.  When it contains non-RAD50 characters, it is mapped
into a unique name of a very specific form.  There is a table of these
translations kept in a file in the directory.  This sounds somewhat hokey,
but turns out to win quite often. The number of times it gets invoked
isn't that bad, and "ls" is modified to know about these peculiar names
and not display them (sort of like "." files).  A VMS DIR command will
show them, but the normal "ls" doesn't.  The only thing I can't figure
out how to do is real links.  Since VMS doesn't have them, I can't
see an easy way to do them (doesn't mean the haven't found a way!),
but you can do symbolic links (but I don't know if they did that).
Anyway, real Unix filename transparency is a big win, and the mechanism
Unity uses works out pretty well, or seems to.
	-Mike