Personally, I think that the initial // behaviour is totally broken,
because it's against the whole unix philosophy of having a unified file
system name space, but we don't really need to care about it, and linux
handles that the "correct" way (as do just about all the other "normal"
unixes out there).
Actually, I think the standard Unix behavior is broken in this regard, since it
doesn't handle a networked environment uniformly, and NFS with its automounting
is an abomination. I spent a number of years using Domain/OS, in which //
referred to the network root directory. With Domain/OS, you could construct a
file name which was valid anywhere in the entire network and referred to the
same object, such as //atlantis/lnz/foo. That is there was a single namespace
across the entire network, and you didn't need to "mount" every file system you
might ever want to access. File names beginning with a single / were relative
to the local node only.
I know that some systems make the Unix naming a little more palatable by
reserving /net/hostname/filesystem for referring uniformly to network files,
but that's really no cleaner than // in that it makes /net a special piece of
syntax. Personally, I always found the //nodename prefix a reasonably elegant
solution.
Leonard