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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

At least Windows paths are not as clunky as Cutler's prior operating system, VAX/VMS Version 1.00 21-AUG-1978 15:54.

  $ create/directory dm0:[foobar]
  $ set default dm0:[foobar]
  $ copy DM0:[SYSMGR]SYSTARTUP.COM example.txt
  $ dir/full

  DIRECTORY DM0:[FOOBAR]
  21-APR-23 14:42

  EXAMPLE.TXT;1 (615,2) 0./0. 21-APR-23 14:42 [1,4] [RWED,RWED,RWED,RE]

  TOTAL OF 0./0. BLOCKS IN 1. FILE

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I rather liked VMS conventions as it was immediately obvious what was the directory part of the path and what was the filename and the device. You could create virtual devices as well, so for example, with VMS TeX, I had TEX_ROOT defined to point to the root of the TeX distribution and you would have TEX_ROOT:[INPUTS] for the input directory, TEX_ROOT:[MF] for Metafont files, TEX_ROOT:[EXE] for executables, etc. and everything was logically arranged. CLD files were another wonderful thing where you could define your CLI interface in an external file and let the OS handle argument and option parsing for you.

> I rather liked VMS conventions as it was immediately obvious what was the directory part of the path and what was the filename and the device.

1. unix doesn't expose devices in the file tree, and thank the [deity] for that

2. directory part: everything to the last /

3. filename: everything afte the last /

4. TEX_ROOT=/foo/bar; cd $TEX_ROOT/MF

Could it be any easier?

> unix doesn't expose devices in the file tree

I mean, they are exposed as files (e.g. /dev/sda) within the file tree, but they aren’t exposed by a file path.

Maybe parent is talking about the fact that you don’t know whether bar in foo/bar is a file or a directory?

On 2 & 3, what if you have a directory? There’s no easy way to tell whether /foo/bar is a directory or a file. FOO:[BAR] must be a directory.

I have a vague notion that there might have been the ability to have a virtual device span multiple directories, but as I think about it, this seems unlikely since it would make it ambiguous where something would be created if a directory exists in both root1 and root2, so perhaps not. It’s been 23 years since I last used VMS and 30 since it was my daily driver though, so it’s hard for me to say too much.

Clunky? Version control built in, distributed FS built in...

The downside of building in stuff is that you can't easily replace it. I don't have any VMS experience, but the versioned file systems I've studied are very far from being a replacement for what I would consider version control today. They're more like the automatic writing of backup files in Emacs.

Distributed FS sounds like something with a huge design space. It's better to do that in userspace. Was Plan 9 really the first time virtual file systems could be implemented in userspace? It seems like such an obviously useful idea in retrospect.

The diff3 utility for 3-way merge appeared after the VMS debut (1979).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff3

Can you really call what we see in VMS full revision control when it lacks this capability?

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