"Don" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> "Don" <[email protected]> wrote in message >> news:[email protected]... >>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote: >>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:01:49 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <[email protected]> wrote: >>>>> People don't always realize it, but Windows really is the same way. >>>>> It's >>>>> really only the user-level applications like Explorer that ever care >>>>> about >>>>> "extension", and even then the extension is always just "everything >>>>> after >>>>> the last dot in the filename". Anything beyond that is merely >>>>> tradition and >>>>> convention. The only real difference is that windows has no standard >>>>> mechanism for looking at the content of the file to help determine its >>>>> type. >>> No, it tries hard to make it look that way, but it's evolved from a >>> system where extensions were fundamental. >>> Even now, an 8.3 filename still exists for every file. >>> >> >> The existence of an 8.3 fallback doesn't really have any bearing on it. >> And neither does pedigree. If there is still a fundamental distinction >> with extension, it's nothing more than a detail of how the filesystem >> spec defines its data storage and completely abstracted away by the >> filesystem driver. >> >> Name one case in windows where some sort of distinction between filename >> and extension actually makes a real tangible difference versus unix, that >> doesn't merely amount to convention (there's zero technical hurdle in the >> way of a windows program considering ".bashrc" to be extensionless) or >> manually re-implementing part of the filesystem spec (heck, unix has >> FAT32 and NTFS drivers, too). > > ?????? > It ALWAYS makes a difference. For example, only .exe and .com files are > executable. > On unix, the filename is just a name. Nothing more. By contrast, the > Windows extension actually matters. They're completely different. > > No, it's not "just a convention". It's completely enforced. You cannot > execute a file if it has the wrong extension. > On Windows, the extension is used to identify the file. Just as unix > uses the magic number at the start of the file. >
Because windows occasionally cares about the extention doesn't imply it isn't part of the filename.
