[SAGA-RG] missing(?) method reporting last modification time

[Thilo Kielmann]

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 02:09:25PM +0200, Andre Merzky wrote:

> > I may want to add that also not all languages support more than the
> > last modification time, e.g. Java only has this one...
> 
> Thats interesting.  Not relevant, but is that because Java
> meets the smallest common denominator here? Simple file
> systems such as FAT only support mtime, ususally, AFAIK.
> 
> Does Java have a stat call?

AFAIK, Java is considered to be an "application" programming language, as 
opposed to systems programming languages. You can find this back e.g. in
the stream-based file API, where random seeks are "not done" by typical
Java applications. (read/write/seek had only been added later, but "real
Java programmers" (-tm) don't use it ;-)

To the best of my knowledge, there is no stat either.

> > Using the attributes for the modification time (while having get_* for
> > file size) seems odd to me. 
> 
> We should then move size into the attributes, too.  I agree
> that this should be done in a consistent way.

Hmm, I must admit that I am not too familiar with the proper use of
attributes in SAGA. I know we have them, but I never got beyond a vague
feeling that they could be useful "somewhere"...

In SAGA's file (and ns_entry) classes, I can find all commonly used
information via get_*() methods. Which information do file's provide
via attributes??? What I mean: I cannot see a single attribute in file,
so why now start introducing them???


> The use of the templetized accessors is motivated by the
> fact that we have it on task.get_result <type> () already,
> which was actually proposed by Ceriel, and back then you
> liked it a lot ;-)

I never (mentally) mapped task.get_result to typed attributes.
Maybe some more background on them would help me getting a deeper
understanding?


Thilo
-- 
Thilo Kielmann                                 http://www.cs.vu.nl/~kielmann/