[TUHS] Unix APIs: elegant or not?

[Chris Hanson]

On Nov 1, 2018, at 3:20 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> With Unix, everything looks like a file, but as I said, the sockets API broke that convention, forcing users to work at a much lower level than necessary.

This was broken from the start though, and always really meant everything looks like a file *descriptor*, not a path in the filesystem.

There are tons of non-file descriptor namespaces on UNIX platforms. At least some later systems have tried to create a hierarchical “object” abstraction of which file descriptors are just one subtype.

  -- Chris