Resources are a GoodThing(tm) (was Re: MS-DOS FST? => Resources)

[taob@r-node.hub.org (Brian Tao)]

In article <1993May4.222338.8682@fawlty.towers.oz.au>, John MacLean writes...
> 
> Unfortunately, the implementation Apple chose (ie: splitting a file into
> two forks) sucks badly, IMHO.
> It required adding a vast array of support at the operating system level,
> and makes Apple's proprietory file systems very difficult to map to any
> other file systems (such as MSDOS, UNIX, etc).

    Doesn't OS/2 support files with multiple "threads"?  NeXTStep has a
similar concept where an "application" is really a directory and each
"resource" is a file inside the directory.  But to the user in the GUI,
the whole folder looks like a single, executable file.  If you drop into
a shell, you'll see that the "application" is really just a small
hierarchy of subdirectories.

    The Amiga OS stores some file-specific stuff in *.info files, which
can be implemented as a rIcon, rBundle, rComment, etc. resources in
GS/OS or Mac HFS.  The OS normally hides these .info files from the
user, but it has to remember to copy/move/rename/delete these files when
the actual file is copied/moved/renamed/deleted.  With resources,
everything is in one convenient bundle.
-- 
Brian Tao:: taob@r-node.hub.org (r-Node BBS, 416-249-5366, FREE!)
::::::::::: 90taobri@wave.scar.utoronto.ca (University of Toronto)