> Good, so it's not a format clash in Jmol, but merely an extension clash in > general... nothing we can do about... (whoever came up with the idea that > a > file must be 8.3 ???? :)
I think that the 3 character extension came about because one can store 3 upper case characters in 2 bytes. If you restrict your character set to 40 characters (26 upper-case chars + 10 digits + _ + 3 more) then 40*40*40 = 64000 ... 64000 < 65536 so it will fit in 2 bytes. This trick was also useful for symbol tables in early for FORTRAN compilers, where 6 chars could fit into 4 bytes. (Separately, you could also fit a 6 char FORTRAN symbol into a single word on a 36 bit machine which used a 6-bit character set ... machines from General Electric, DEC PDP-6, DEC PDP-10) I may be mistaken, but I think that the file systems for the DEC PDP-11 (like RT-11) used 6.3 file names ... 6 bytes in total. Not sure where the '8' came from in '8.3'. CP/M had 8.3 file names, so MS-DOS inherited 8.3 directly from there. But the use of 8.3 may well have predated CP/M. Miguel ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games. Get your fingers limbered up and give it your best shot. 4 great events, 4 opportunities to win big! Highest score wins.NEC IT Guy Games. Play to win an NEC 61 plasma display. Visit http://www.necitguy.com/?r _______________________________________________ Jmol-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-developers
