Having lived through the entire DOS world and before, I welcomed long filenames when Bill got around to them. We've had them in Pick since day one (or two) and clearly before Mr. Gates started with 8.3.
While numerically there are 8 billion (I'll take your word on that although I know how to derive, Minesweeper anyone?), the real trouble was two-fold. First, you either had to have an external table to help with the definitions of the 8 digits or you had to un-do the abbreviations. If you assigned sequential values, ie BUD00001.XLS (sic) or SLS000001.XLS you would have to know what the numbers meant, ie an external reference. If you tried to abbreviate, you ran into "1987 Actual vs Budget" spreadsheet as ACTBUD87.XLS and it gets pretty tricky. And forget about program names. I've got dozens of Quick Basic apps written under the 8.3 guidelines and since the 3 was usually BAS, you weren't given much abbreviation room. Perhaps the big difference is that while an older environment could have hundreds of spreadsheets or basic programs, a MV system probably won'd have but a few names common entities. My 1 cent. Mark Johnson ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Wolverton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 26, 2005 10:21 PM Subject: RE: [U2] UD: Named common > At this moment and time, that would be true... But how many unique > combinations of 7 characters can be created? 26 to the 7th power? (if we > exclude numerics, anyway!) So far, 8 billion+ choices has been enough > leeway for us to work within - But it is a hard limit -- we just truncated > our Common Group labels to meet the requirement, and moved the 'unique' > attributes to the FRONT of the common block labels. > > DW > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Haskett > Sent: Monday, December 26, 2005 9:05 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [U2] UD: Named common > > Is it true UniData named common cannot have a label longer than 7 > characters? Is this a paleozoic joke or is it a PICK basic type thing? > "Onward & Upward". :-) > > Thanks. > > Bill > ------- > u2-users mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/ > ------- > u2-users mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/ ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
