Re: Extensionless headers

[Joe Buck <jbuck at synopsys dot COM>]

Jason Merrill writes:
> > The extension typically indicates the type of a file.  Among the
> > development tools that use this information are Make and editors.
> > Extensions also allow me to use a wildcard to select files of a certain
> > type; I generally do a 'grep something *.h' in gcc several times a day.
> > Removing the extension breaks all of these uses.  There are workarounds,
> > but why bother?  Why not just keep the extension?

Ben Kosnik writes:
> Thanks for the summary. 
> 
> I'm assuming what you say applies to both ext/ and std/ headers, correct? 
> I would like to try and have some consistency, if at all possible.

Yes, ideally there will be no extensionless headers at all except those
mandated by the standard (and of course even the standard doesn't mandate
that there be actual extensionless files, only that #include <iostream>
make the appropriate definitions appear).  Extensionless files, or files
that don't use the expected extension, don't work and play well with
editors, IDEs, desktops, make, find, or anything else.  Unless maybe
you're on a Mac, there's no good reason to deviate from this.