29 Aug
2006
29 Aug
'06
12:02 a.m.
> Are you asking, "Did any system keep file
type information out of
> the file name?" The answer is "yes, several did". [...]
Yes, I *know* this has been done other ways in the
past. What I am
trying to figure out is the rationale behind why it has (apparently)
migrated into the file *name*.
Well, I would point out that it moved into the name before it moved out
of the filesystem. VMS (see my previous note) not only had a fairly
rich set of file types in-filesystem, but also had naming conventions
to go with them (which in my experience were mostly just conventions,
ie, advisory).
I don't know why this was. I conjecture that it was done so that the
type, or at least a decent approxmation to the type, would be available
to a human looking at a directory listing. One could say that this
could have been done by printing type information in directory
listings, but that misses the point that conceptual file types were not
1:1 with filesystem file types - as a simple example, the filesystem
type information for a plain text doc file and a FORTRAN source file
might well be exactly the same.
I.e. if you were starting from scratch *today*, why
would you chose
to encode file types in file names? vs. some other alternative??
I'm not sure I would choose to. If I did, though, a large part of why
would be that humans are used to it. :-)
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