Ram disks

[gwyn at brl-vld]

From:      Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn at brl-vld>

I think your point about disk files not being a natural programming
construct, and the suggestion about a replacement concept, are both
good ideas.

Disks DO have one advantage over RAM, although not from the programming
language viewpoint, and that is that their cost per bit is much lower.
I think we will always have multi-level storage schemes because of the
economic considerations.  It WOULD be nice if programs didn't
unnecessarily have a particular partitioning built into them.

I would like to see the specification of time criticality taken a
step farther, and specify the maximum (average and/or worst-case) time
permissible for function execution (or maybe just data access).  I
don't see a good way of implementing this, but it would be useful for
true real-time systems.