Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Files starting with .
From: Sak Wathanasin (sw@nan.co.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 26 1998 - 02:54:12 EST
In reply to Neil McAllister's message of the 25/10/98 at 13:52 -0800,
> in filenames. With all the "extended" characters the Mac has available,
> they could have perhaps picked a more-innocuous path delimiter.
Innocuous for whom? They took this approach in MPW (where, e.g., the escape
char is '', option-d for those with MIME-challenged mailreaders, instead of
Unix's '\'), and that led to all sorts of complaints from people who
a) couldn't send scripts in ASCII email
b) found it hard to type on non-US keyboards (I lied: it isn't always option-d)
c) different
And what about (e.g.) Kanji filenames? If they'd picked one of the chars with
the top-bit set, they might have ruled out not just 1 symbol, but a whole range
of them. Or is this not a problem with Unicode?
The point is that somebody somewhere gets inconvenienced. And anyway, I think
you're all blasting away at the wrong target: the 31-char limiatation is a much
more serious problem (esp in double-byte systems). I say this with some feeling
since I'm in the midst of a biggish Java project...
Sak Wathanasin
Network Analysis Limited
178 Wainbody Ave South, Coventry CV3 6BX, UK
Internet: sw@nan.co.uk
Phone: (+44) 1203 419996 Fax: (+44) 1203 690690
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