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Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Please actually try researching the concepts and papers about Plan 9 and Inferno before making such sophomoric statements as "A local file is not the same thing as a remote file." As if no one has thought about this before.

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As much as I love the way p9 modeled the world, I agree a tiny little bit about cwyers, in that the notion of file is stretched a little too thin. I do love the consistency but these aren't files anymore but namespaced objects, unless a file is a pipe `or` a register `or` a document `or` container of files.

Which is the point. Files may be synthetic references to resources and not actual on-disk files, it's a general abstraction.

It's just a vocabulary thing, `file` is not that generic.

Yes, it is. A file is just a representation of resources, nothing more. You can have files as a user convenience without even having a file system, but rather a persistent object store.

A file is an object that supports the methods open(), read(), write(), and a few others. That's about a generic as you can get.

If I write <data> /dev/net/tcp can I read and get <data> back ?

Can I append <data> /dev/mouse ?

Sharing {open,read,write,close} interface, but with exception and different semantics leads to a weird flavour of genericity.

Are you objecting to the _notion_ that is called a file in Plan 9, or to the fact that it is _called_ a file? I would regard the latter as just a synecdoche, using the name of the most well-known realization of that general concept to stand for all of the realizations of that concept.

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