> 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.
>
> Stuart Brady
Again: Compressed SAD is still a SAD.
Microsoft made many versions of their Word and DOC files.
If Microsoft named each particular version with a new name,
now we would have tens of file extensions.
But there is only one extension: DOC.
So I think this is our case. If I will make a new version of SAD
file format (i.e. packed SAD), I will leave the existing extension
unchanged.
If somebody will want to pack old SAD's to new shorter files,
he probably will use a program to do it (:-)). That program can
easily distinguish between packed and unpacked SAD, so
there will be no "Bad Thing [tm]" as Stuart Brady wrote.
In addition, you can never use new fileformats in old programs.
(Again you can't load the lastest DOC files to the older Word.)
So you even won't be able to load packed SAD's to older
SimCoupe.
That's reality.
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Aley [eili] Keprt - student, programmer (multimedia soft. etc.)
phone: +420-68-538 70 35
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