Structured streams

[sergio . k]

As you are rebuilding things, I have a particular vision about how things 
should be in an operating system that I wish to share. The central thing and 
the best one in Unix is the stream. You could mix several programs with 
pipes for instance and compose the result you wish, because the support for 
it is built into the system. But they are not structured ones. Is common do 
a very spartan output to easy the pipeling (no headers, no totals etc). Is 
that way in all the commands built in (ls etc). But imagine that all the 
system pipes could have attached to it an information about its structure. I 
could extract from ls output only the columns I wish; I could send to the 
sound board a waveform (bytes) to only the rear speakers and with a selected 
volume; and so on. I think this will be a major evolution and a useful one. 

Eventually this would be a universal system format to save several things, 
like persistent objects to disk or to send them over a network, compiled 
libs and etc. This simplifies the development and everyone could open the 
file and analyze it (no proprietary file formats!). 

If you like these ideas, please answer and I will try to explain more. 

Sergio Kneizl - Brazil 

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