Re: Genericity, strong typing, SOAP-RPC, GRASP, and defining the Web

Miles Sabin wrote:

> Jeff Bone wrote,
> > As my perennial anecdotal evidence to suggest that system complexity
> > is vastly reduced and power gained by highly constrained type
> > systems / universal generic interfaces, consider the overall
> > simplicity and "functionality to lines-of-code" qualities obtained
> > in Plan vis-a-vis UNIX by pushing the "everything is a file,"
> > "everything in the same namespace," and "text streams everywhere"
> > concepts to their logical conclusions.
>
> That's a good example, but it also does a good job of showing up
> the limitations of that sort of extremism. What are all those ioctls
> for if the Plan 9/UNIX model is really so uniform? Can you really
> accept() on a _file_ descriptor as opposed to a listening socket
> descriptor? Is the uniformity reality or ideology?

Notice that I said Plan [9, woops] *vis-a-vis* UNIX.  Plan 9 doesn't have
an ioctl call, AFAIK:

  http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html?pat=ioctl

jb