Re: ext/ names (was: re:[PATCH] HP/SGI extensions to...)

["jon [tm]" <cow at compsoc dot man dot ac dot uk>]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 03:08:06PM +0100, Paolo Carlini wrote:

> > >From a lowly user's point of view, I prefer suffixed headers, if only
> > because a number of editors I use won't automatically do syntax
> > highlighting on a file without a suffix, so if I open up ext/memory to
[snip]
> ... by the way, I had'nt conisdered this before myself, since even more often than
> 'nedit' I use 'emacs' and 'emacs' is sufficiently smart to choose the optimal
> highlightning scheme on the basis of the *actual* content of the file not its
> extension!

: aargh! resists temptation to start emacs/vi fight  :)

I use vi or vim most of the time, and it is a problem with vim.

As for my other comment about graphical file managers ... it's occurred to
me that includes MS Windows. Windows relies almost exclusively on
extensions to determine filetype, so a suffixless file can't be opened by
double-clicking, even if the user has set .h files to open in a certain
editor. So libstdc++ under cygwin would have lots of suffixless files that
appear as "unknown" type and can't be opened without selecting an app
every time. (This isn't actually a problem for me, as KDE also looks at
the contents if it can't determine the type from the extension.)

As I said, I don't think these are terribly important, but still worth
considering. (How often *do* users open system headers? I know I do it
fairly regularly, but that's partly because I still use 2.95 and the
function prototypes don't match the standard.)


jon


-- 
sigfault