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A rope is a string that supports fast insertion and deletion of slices, and fast concatenation. Ropes also allow multiple versions of a string to be stored efficiently.

I want a file system that does that.

• Most text editing takes this form. Editors could work on the file directly, instead of keeping an in-memory copy.

• Efficiently maintain backups.

• Databases become trivial, just keep a sorted list. (see last blog entry)

I suspect the only reason file-systems don't use ropes is that ropes weren't invented back when the APIs were decided on.

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