[Ur] Basic file operations

[Adam Chlipala]

Gian Perrone wrote:
> On 28/09/11 10:58 AM, Ron de Bruijn wrote:
>> It appears that no file API exists, except for the existence of a few 
>> real web related operations in basis.urs.
>>
>> Are there any plans for implementing readFile, writeFile, appendFile, 
>> etc.?
>>
> I very much doubt it.  There's not really any nice way to do this such 
> that it is transactional and can be rolled back at will.  I suspect 
> simulating files in the database layer is a better solution for 99% of 
> things, and then a custom FFI-based solution will cover the last 1% in 
> some potentially unsafe ways.

Right.  It would be semantically disastrous to expose the standard file 
IO operations directly, since all server-side code runs in transactions 
that should have serializable semantics.