There is a natural hierarchy of code-partitioning methods that has evolved as programmers have had to manage ever-increasing levels of complexity. In the beginning, everything was one big lump of machine code. The earliest procedural languages brought in the notion of partition by subroutine. Then we invented service libraries to share common utility functions among multiple programs. Next, we invented separated address spaces and communicating processes. Today we routinely distribute program systems across multiple hosts separated by thousands of miles of network cable.read more...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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