On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 02:09:25PM +0200, Andre Merzky wrote:
I may want to add that also not all languages support more than the last modification time, e.g. Java only has this one...
Thats interesting. Not relevant, but is that because Java meets the smallest common denominator here? Simple file systems such as FAT only support mtime, ususally, AFAIK.
Does Java have a stat call?
AFAIK, Java is considered to be an "application" programming language, as opposed to systems programming languages. You can find this back e.g. in the stream-based file API, where random seeks are "not done" by typical Java applications. (read/write/seek had only been added later, but "real Java programmers" (-tm) don't use it ;-) To the best of my knowledge, there is no stat either.
Using the attributes for the modification time (while having get_* for file size) seems odd to me.
We should then move size into the attributes, too. I agree that this should be done in a consistent way.
Hmm, I must admit that I am not too familiar with the proper use of attributes in SAGA. I know we have them, but I never got beyond a vague feeling that they could be useful "somewhere"... In SAGA's file (and ns_entry) classes, I can find all commonly used information via get_*() methods. Which information do file's provide via attributes??? What I mean: I cannot see a single attribute in file, so why now start introducing them???
The use of the templetized accessors is motivated by the fact that we have it on task.get_result <type> () already, which was actually proposed by Ceriel, and back then you liked it a lot ;-)
I never (mentally) mapped task.get_result to typed attributes. Maybe some more background on them would help me getting a deeper understanding? Thilo -- Thilo Kielmann http://www.cs.vu.nl/~kielmann/