> I agree with that, having seen this before, but I am curious... It seems that
> such functionality did not get there by accident (I cannot think of a way to
> ignore characters in a filename without some _extra_ coding), so it must have
> been done for some purpose. Yet I cannot for the life of me imagine what
> benefit this produces, or what fault it would circumvent. Anyone have ideas
> as to this?
Back in the old days, the filename and extension really used to be
handled separately. FAT filesystems still store them separately. If
a file didn't have an extension, some programs would concatenate a dot
and an empty string. When MS-DOS parsed the filename, it used the dot
only to split the filename and extension, but ignored it otherwise.
Add in a touch of the usual Microsoft madness and I'm sure it will all
make sense.
On the other hand, people who cut-n-paste filenames from the ends of
sentences won't have troubles with the extraneous period ;-)
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