Fred Drake wrote:
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Greg Ewing <[email protected]> wrote:
We don't have to make it look so Windows-like, though. We could
use something more cheerful such as 'python.nothisisnotthedirectory'.
Yes, but... the sad part is that a turd has to be added, or the name
changed in even less satisfactory ways. Case-senselessness is still
senseless.
/me mourns the loss of case-sense in "pop" operating systems.
Actually, "loss" is not quite what happened here. Unix-derived systems
(Unix, Linux, *BSD) are somewhat unusual in having case-sensitive file
systems. Of the alphabet soup of operating systems that I've used, I
can remember case sensitive files systems in the Unix-like systems, Plan
9, and Apple II DOS -- but the Apple II doesn't have lower case letters
on the keyboard/display, so I'm not sure it counts.
I used to think that case-sensitive identifiers are a good idea, but I
now think that it is just too error-prone to use identifiers that differ
only in case. Also, it's not portable... :)
b.t.w. The extension is ".cfg" because RT-11 stored file names in a
character set called "Radix 50" that could pack 3 characters into a 16
bit word. CP/M pretty obviously copied RT-11, MS-DOS copied CP/M, and
MS Windows was originally a GUI framework for MS-DOS. Meanwhile, Unix
initially ran on other DEC systems, so a lot of early Unix users had
contact with RT-11 or its descendants, and re-used some of the same
conventions.
So, "We use .cfg because we have calling it that since 1970..."
Interesting, but perhaps not a particularly compelling reason. :)
>sniff< - what's that smell? Oh yeah -- old farts...
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