COUNTSIZE doesn't work in DIRECTORY

[rmkaplan]

The problem is that the DREVERSE at the end converts the numeric VALUE to NIL, should be guarded by a LISTP.

But there is still a needless and unintuitive confusion between SIZE and LENGTH. If SIZE is interpreted as pages, COUNTSIZE would presumably give you the number of pages, not the number of bytes as would be typically expected.

I propose making SIZE and LENGTH be synonyms, and determining the difference in their current behaviors by a separate modifier that specifies the units. So SIZE and LENGTH would show the same unitized numbers, and COUNTSIZE would show the sum of those numbers. The modifiers would be BYTES (default), KB, MB, GB, PAGES, and those would be the column headers. The modifiers could also be specified alone.

So:
DIR * SIZE KB
DIR * KB
would both show kilobytes
DIR * COUNTSIZE MB would show the megabyte sum

Separately, the additional column information for long file names causes a line break after the file name, which makes the DIR printout longer and less readable. There is no good solution, other than to do what FILEBROWSER does--enumerate all the files to get the maximum length before printing. An intermediate approach would be to let the column drift to the right so that it is always lined up according to the longest previously seen file. Of course, the information would drift away from the initial column headers, but I think the resulting display for directories with long file names would be more compact (no extra lines) and easier to read.

[masinter]

needless and unintuitive confusion between SIZE and LENGTH

SIZE and LENGTH aren't the same and I'm not sure what the nature of the confusion might be. Length counts in bytes and size counts in pages. There are possible differences for files on file servers. Or if you're counting size in pages you want to round up so a 3-byte long file would count as 1 page.

[rmkaplan]

To the extent that a modern, ordinary (non Interlisp-geek) user has an intuition about what SIZE means, it's what we implement as LENGTH. Our notion of size in pages is a technical internal measure, another historical pecularity. Anyone coming in now has to be taught that it doesn't count what one would expect. To put it another way, it doesn't make sense to compare the numbers that you see as Size in any other environment (Mac, Windows...) against the numbers that we show as Size. The meaningful numbers are bytes, KB, MB etc. DIR in particular is a user facing function, it should DWIM.

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On Mar 24, 2026, at 12:25 PM, Larry Masinter ***@***.***> wrote: masinter left a comment (Interlisp/medley#2549) <#2549 (comment)> needless and unintuitive confusion between SIZE and LENGTH SIZE and LENGTH aren't the same and I'm not sure what the nature of the confusion might be. Length counts in bytes and size counts in pages. There are possible differences for files on file servers. Or if you're counting size in pages you want to round up so a 3-byte long file would count as 1 page. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2549?email_source=notifications&email_token=AQSTUJML7Y6FZTFZJSIMZ3D4SLOLBA5CNFSNUABFM5UWIORPF5TWS5BNNB2WEL2JONZXKZKDN5WW2ZLOOQXTIMJSGA4DCMRRHE32M4TFMFZW63VGMF2XI2DPOKSWK5TFNZ2KYZTPN52GK4S7MNWGSY3L#issuecomment-4120812197>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AQSTUJKQ3JQAZVKDR7K2DVL4SLOLBAVCNFSM6AAAAACW5VBZ6GVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHM2DCMRQHAYTEMJZG4>. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.