Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Files starting with .
From: Juergen Christoffel (jc@gmd.de)
Date: Mon Oct 26 1998 - 10:22:42 EST
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 08:44:20 -0600
From: Brian Bergstrand <brianb@niu.edu>
>I believe the gentleman's point is that it seems pretty silly for an OS
>that prides itself on its user-friendliness to aribtrarily decide that
>nobody should wish (or in any case, be allowed) to use the colon character
>in filenames.
Exactly, that's my point.
BTW, "they"(Apple) did a lot of studies on the filesytem directory
delimiter, just like they did on the one or two button mouse thing.
Guess what, Apple chose ":" because most users in their studies said
that would be the least likely character they would use in the name of a
file. I wouldn't call that arbitrary.
They did a lot of studies? That makes me curious: do you have a pointer as
to where to find these? Given the visual nature of the user interface they
didn't need a delimiter at all: no command line interface as in Unix with
the need to use a printable character which one can type, and no, MPW and
AppleScript did appear much later; internal structures could cope with any
byte code and even could use schemes without an explicit delimiter at all.
--jc
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