Andrew Collier wrote: >Surely it is better to have different extensions for distinguishable file >types.
It is. [snip] >No no no, the filename extension should be meaningful to the user (as well >as to the computer, if the computer takes any notice of it anyway). Yep. That's the standard way of doing things. Simcoupe itself should only care about the first two bytes of the file. The file manager will need to know what the type is, so that it knows what to open it with. For example, you may want to have compress on the menu for sad files, and uncompress on the menu for saz files. [snip] >> Internally packed SAD is still a SAD. It's a compressed sad -- the user *needs* to know this. [snip] >Exactly. If you use a standard compression alogrithm (but still internal >to SimCoupe) and save the files with the standard extention for that >algorithm, then everybody can still use the file. And in a large group of mixed types when you want to compress only the uncompressed files, you can tell which ones they are. A simple gzip *.sad would do the trick. Otherwise... you might be trying to compress compressed files, which would be a Bad Thing [tm], too. >Let's say the new SimCoupe/Win32 saves a file as a .dsk.gz (for example). >People with the same version can just load the file, but everybody else >can also use it because they know how to decompress it first. >I don't think the long filename should be a problem - how many people >still use DOS outside of Windows95/98/NT any more? Some people do. That's why you should use saz for sad.gz/zip, in the same way people use tgz for tar.gz. The extension should change, though. -- Stuart Brady
