From: muta...@gmail.com   
      
   It seems to me that there are two different ways of   
   writing an OS.   
      
   1. Unix-style. open/read/write or my equivalent   
   PosOpenFile etc. These OSes allow an arbitrary   
   number of bytes to be read from a stream.   
      
   It might be necessary to extend this so that the   
   open() call knows whether this is a text or binary   
   stream as that may have implications when writing   
   to a device like a card punch.   
      
   2. MVS-style. The OS does not maintain bytes for you.   
   You are instead given an entire block and expected to   
   manage it yourself.   
      
   MVS has a RECFM=V which I don't think should be   
   supported as a concept for an OS standard.   
      
   There is also the possibility of blocks being shorter   
   than the maximum (for the end of the file). But there   
   will be a concept of the block size being a multiple of   
   a particular number (record size).   
      
   I don't think the MVS concept of short blocks in the   
   middle of a file should be supported for an OS   
   standard.   
      
      
   I don't like POSIX, which does (1), since it requires   
   things like fork(). I'm after a simple API for (1), close   
   to MSDOS.   
      
   And I'm after an API for (2).   
      
   PDPCLIB can then support these two flavors. It basically   
   already does, but not for these exact 2 APIs which haven't   
   been defined yet.   
      
   Any thoughts?   
      
   BFN. Paul.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)