I like opiniated softwares and I would gladly accept such a convention if
there was real value in it.

I know that a file extension is only a hint and that we could expect a
clever parser to be able to figure out the language by itself.

But now what if ruby, perl, python, C, C#, java, etc. stopped to use
extensions as well ? Isn't it pretty handy to recognize a language thanks
to an extension ? If we push this further, shouldn't .cxx files also have no
extension ? (a clever tool should be able to recognize headers files from
implementation files, isn't it ?)

The same could be said for code comments. There is no fundamental need for
comments. They are only hints, a good programmer could figure out what a
code does just by looking at it. Now would you like all comments removed and
ask the programmers to be more clever ?

Of course, there is a balance to find : hints add redundancy and should be
provided only where it's expected to be difficult to find the original
info. But using extensions for sources is used by 99.9% of people, even for
C++ (.hpp and .cpp or .hxx and .cxx)  Wt use extensionless headers just to
look like Qt (*that* I can understand) which itself wanted to look like the
standard lib. Now the standard lib used this questionable technique just for
the sake of avoiding conflicts :
(http://stackoverflow.com/questions/441568/when-can-you-omit-the-file-extension-in-an-include-directive)
and their way, while maybe acceptable in their specific situation, should
not be followed by anything which is not C++ standard. And it is indeed not
followed in most libraries.

The solution I suggest (using extensions for every source file,
implementation and headers, and keeping extensionless files as proxies for
compatibility and Qt-ness) is simple, would follow standard practices, would
not break anything, would make Wt more consistent and ease the life of
everyone. It's better to be done by the Wt team itself that manually by all
Wt users.

Hope some of you agree !
Regards and have a nice day.

2011/9/13 Matthew Sherborne <[email protected]>

> I vote, editor's problem, not library's.
>
> Maybe eclipse can be configured to recognise file types by contents ?
>
> if you 're on linux you could make a bunch of symlinks so it looks like
> you're loading the .hpp files.
>
> but then if you're on linux you could use kdevelop or qtcreator ide and not
> have the trouble.
>
> code blocks is not too bad an editor too.
>
> (Personally I use vim and ctags).
>
>
>
>
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