Jonadab the Unsightly One skribis 2004-09-17 10:46 (-0400): > * They are of critical importance on Apache-based webservers.
They are not. See mod_mime_magic. > * They instruct command-line tab completion for some shells. This > IMO is a biggie, and would be even bigger if more shells were > smarter. (eshell has a leg up here.) And this is not something to write home about. They're giving extensions meaning in a world that doesn't really have extensions. Gzip does this too, but at least that is limited to the application. The shell tries to match up other applications with file extensions. Yesterday, because I couldn't tab-complete an .iso file for use with mplayer at all, I decided to finally get rid of this kind of tab completion. > * They matter somewhat in the VMS world, though not as much as under > Windows I think. The real point is that file extensions decide whether a file is executable in Windows, that associations are all organized in one location. Many other platforms don't work like this, and if they do, it's nearly impossible to get this to work well portably. > Archimedes. It doesn't allow them at all, from what I understand. It probably doesn't disallow file extensions, but the dot that most people think is the only way to separate base name from extension. It's all about heuristics, and I'd hate to have perl behave differently when the filename is different. Perl shouldn't have to care about the given file name at all. perl < $file and perl $file should work the same. Juerd
