>>>> A new _flat_ namespace for each resource.
>>>> A new flat namespace _with human-meaningless names_ for each resource.
>>> Have you never heard of inode numbers?   :-)
>> Certainly.  How many APIs use them?
> Unix filesystems use inodes.  :)

In the API??  The only placees I know of they appear in the API are
st_ino and d_ino (or whatever they call them these days).

> but my point was that a namespace consisting of integers isn't such a
> horrible idea

Maybe, maybe not, but your example is irrelevant - inumbers are _not_
the API-visible namespace for filesystems!

> ftok() _should_ always create a unique key to match any unique file
> and 'id' parameter (and of course _should_ always return the same key
> for the same file & 'id').

Which implies that no conformant OS on a machine with 32-bit ints can
ever support as many as 2^24 files simultaneously accessible.

Nice idea.  It won't fly in practice.

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