John L. Ries wrote:
Would be interesting to know if there are any standards on this
Extended Pascal has bindings which have the same issues. But AFAICS the description of the external relationship is very vague, and since "The binding shall be implementationÂÂdefined.", I suppose almost any behaviour would be allowed.
(Is Scott Moore paying any attention?)... my own view would be that once a file is open, it's open and you ought to be able access it even if you change directories and even if someone else changes the name of the file
This is true in any case as long as the file remains open. The question is what happens if the file is "reopened" (e.g., `Rewrite', then `Reset'). How do we interpret this? Is it still (meant to be) the same file, opened in a different mode, or do we open another file (which may happen to be the same file as before if names and directories weren't changed). According to Waldek's comments, the problems in the first case seem to be bigger, though.
(which is one of the reasons why OS' generally only allow one process write access to a file at a time).
I don't know which OS's you use, but mine generally allow multiple write access, unless expliclty locked. (Quite useful for shared logfiles, e.g.)
Frank