Re[3]: [MacPerl] MacPerl to Unix

[Scott_Ananian@sil.org]

Sorry about the previous spurious message.  Mailer went nuts (I prefer my UNIX
mailer!).

A quick note re: filename.extension vs filename....

Yes, it's not a native feature of the OS for unix/mac.  But it *is* native on
one major platform (DOS) so it's a worthwhile "compatibility" feature to
include, since filename.extension is a legal name format on the other OSes. 
(Can anyone think of an example where it's not?  All the systems I can think of,
all the way back to the PDP-11 allow the use of an extension...)  Plus, a lot of
the "typical" web-programming tasks perl is used for deal with extensions in
some degree; it's getting to become a 'web standard' to identify file-types.  So
I think it is valuable to have a file function primitive that deals with
extensions -- whether natively supported or "emulated".

The &islegalpathname() or equivalent should check extension length, too, on
those systems where it is limited [3 characters DOS FAT, 2 characters PDP-11...
=) ]
Actually, to be able to portably construct filenames incorporating an
"extension" (again, whether native or not) a 'max extension length' function
might prove useful, as well....
  --Scott

[See, your comments weren't that pedantic after all!]

______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: Re: [MacPerl] MacPerl to Unix
Author:  Scott_Ananian@sil.org at Internet
Date:    8/19/96 9:38 PM



We've been discussing this very issue in another thread on this mailing list....

Unix filenames are of the form:

/dir/dir/dir/filename.extension

--actually, to be pedantic, they are /dir/dir/dir/filename where '.' happens to

be a valid filename character. The name.extension format is a DOS-ism (to name
one OS) but is only a naming _convention_ in Unix and Mac.

Mac filenames are like:

Volume:dir:dir:filename.extension

-- see above pedantic remark...

no pedantic;

Michael Houghton