unix file system

[Wayne A. Christopher]

> Some of us at Digital think we have found a basic problem with the  UNIX
> file  system  for FORTRAN.  The problem is that there is no place to put
> various kinds of information about  the  contents  of  the  file.   More
> specifically:

< lots of stuff>

> I'm sure you'll all think of others that would be useful.  Since I  have
> not  looked  at  the  UNIX  internal file system much, I do not know how
> difficult it would be to  find  a  place  to  attach  this  large  (and,
> potentially,  expanding) set of attributes, or what the FOPEN (or other)
> interface would look like to set/get the attribute values.

I don't see what is wrong with letting fortran and its utility programs
do all of this themselves. The problem is that UNIX is not a "fortran"
operating system, and unlike systems like VMS, it doesn't have a lot of
stuff for the benefit of fortran programmers. There is really no reasonable
way to put this into the filesysem itself without a lot of re-writing,
and I doubt many people think it is worth the trouble. The fact is that
fortran is a dying language, and it would be silly to make unix more
friendly to fortran at the expense of more trouble for people who use
modern languages.

	Wayne