Moving open files

[Dotan Cohen]

2008/7/8 Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca>:
> Dotan Cohen wrote:
>
>> When a human moves a stapler from one drawer to another, he has no
>> reason to suspect that any modification to the stapler (such as
>> refilling it) would cause a duplicate stapler to appear in the old
>> drawer. Likewise with the movement of open files. This seems to be a
>> real 'gotcha' or trap that one could very easily fall into.
>
> Oh, come on.  That's a specious example.  In fact, the situation here is
> more like the person taking the staples _out_ of the stapler and putting
> them in another stapler, and then being surprised to find that somebody
> else put staples into the original.
>
> There's no possible way for OO or _any_ other program to know what somebody
> has done with a file outside that program, and that's as true in Windows as
> Linux (and even though Word would lock the file, it _is_ possible to open
> it with other Windows applications).  The best an application can do is
> compare the original file (or a checksum of it) to the current file before
> writing to it, and warn the user if it has been changed.

Any analogy that deals with more than one person is invalid. So far as
the user is concerned, he is the only person using the computer. How
many processes or programs are running is irrelevant to him.

Dotan Cohen

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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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