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From: Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Running an editor from ANSI C
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 23:45:27 +0100
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On 12/06/2024 22:34, Keith Thompson wrote:
> Malcolm McLean <malcolm.arthur.mclean@gmail.com> writes:
> [...]
>> Pepole will want the shell to go into FileSystem XML files, list the
>> contents, and maybe extract or insert individual files. And so I've
>> now
>> put in a powerful ls command.
> [...]
> 
> Which people, other than you, actually want that?  Do you have real
> or potential users who desire that feature?
> 
> Windows can easily mount an ISO image file as a filesystem.
> File Explorer can dive into a .zip file (by unpacking it into a
> temporary directory).  Linux has sshfs and other tools that use
> libfuse, a userspace filesystem framework.  Squashfs is a common way
> to treat a single file as a filesystem.  There are other examples.
> And they all give the user access to all the system tools available
> for working with files and directories; none are restricted to
> whatever facilities are provided by BabyX or some similar project.
> 
> If you're doing this just for the fun of it, that's great --
> but you seem to be saying not just that others will find your XML
> pseudo-filesystem useful, but that there's an existing demand for it.
> I'm skeptical.
> 
I don't know. It's early days yet. But now I can give Baby X some 
attention and generally spruce things up, there are encouraging signs,
and not all hits on the hit counter are my own by any means.

Baby X uses the FileSystem XML format to mount virtual internal drives. 
Now people might not want that, but that's likely because they don't 
want to use Baby X at all. If they do like Baby X, they will be 
intrigued by this. And so they will have a need to be able to edit the 
files. Now one good project will be to write something like Apple's 
finder using Baby X itself. But that's quite a challenge. The other way 
is to provide a Unix-like shell so that people can go into the file, 
move up and down the directories with cd, and then use the basic tools 
like cp, rm and so on to move the files about. And the most important of 
those tools is ls. Whatever you are doing, you will always want to list 
the files. So I spent a lot of time trying to write a really good ls. 
And of course I developed most of it in the regular shell first. You can 
see my efforts on the website.

But now we've got this program, the temptation is to turn it into a 
shell rather than a directory explorer, by adding the ability to run 
MiniBasic scripts. However no one is going to use that for anything 
serious. They'll just want play with the MiniBasic. So I'm holding off 
on any significant work on the interpreter just yet, until the tools for 
the serious user are in and locked down.

And Baby X is portable and baby. Fuse for FileSystem XML is a great 
idea, but not for Baby X.
-- 
Check out my hobby project.
http://malcolmmclean.github.io/babyxrc