Re: Operating System differences and Ada OS independent programming

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 08:58:01 +0100, "Dmitry A. Kazakov"
<mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> declaimed the following:

>
>Files have extensions, don't they?
>
	They didn't on Xerox CP/V -- files were identified by, as I recall, a
32 character string (which could, as I'd done it a few times, include a
<bel> character). Optionally there were fields for user account (to access
files belonging to a different account) and/or password.

32char.account.password

	At my college, it was a convention to preface file names with:

S:		source
R:		ROM (relocatable object module)
L:		LMN (load module, aka "executable", no idea where the N came from)

but those prefaces were just part of the file name and not an OS supported
structure.

	AmigaOS didn't require extensions either; only Workbench (the graphical
environment) required them -- files that were to show up on the Workbench
required a companion 	samename.info		file which contained
information on whether the file was an application or data (data .info held
the path of the executable application that handles the associated file),
the icon graphics for the file, "command line arguments" for invocation,
etc.

	Extensions were used as a convention by tools such as compilers, to
differentiate headers from bodies, object files, etc. But the OS did not
track them as a field separate from the name itself.

	Not like CP/M, TRSDOS, MS-DOS, and related -- the slew of "8.3"
directory structures where extensions had a separate location in the
directory and the "." (or TRSDOS "/") were just separators.

-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/