16 Mar
2007
16 Mar
'07
8:14 a.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
When I got to use a UNIX machine and found file(1),
that was _such_ an
improvement. I stil l don't like OS-enforced extensions, but I've
lived with them under VMS, OS/8, RT-11, DOS, etc. However,
extensionless OSes are the minority, I think.
I like the concept of the OS just "knowing" what a file contains without
having an enforced name - but at the same time (and as someone else mentioned
I think), extensions are useful to human beings in order to collate data (and
to avoid the occasional mishap when the OS gets things wrong - as in Dave's
GIF example)
What really irritates though is people using modern OSes who are still stuck
in the dark ages of DOS 3-letter extensions (people suffixing HTML markup
files with "htm" rather than "html" etc.)