Structured streams

[sergio . k]

Sorry, the last email I sent was garbled, I am sending again:

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