[Oberon] Oberon filenames

[Bernhard Egger]

Armin wrote:
> ...which begs the obvious question.  I should dig into the source for
> an answer, but really, how hard would it be to alter the source to
> accommodate an underscore?

Have a look at OFSAosFiles.Mod (NO), AosDiskFS.Mod (Bluebottle)
respectively.
The procedure "Check" checks if a filename is valid. Only characters,
numbers and dots are allowed, and the filename must start with a character.

According to Pieter it should not be a problem if you alter "Check":
> I think it would be ok to remove the restriction in AosDiskFS.  The only
> special character is ":", which separates a file system prefix from the
local
> file name.  Perhaps "/" can be made special to reserve it for a later
> implementation with subdirectories.  Otherwise I see no reason to disallow
> any character (except 0X of course).
>
> The historical reason for the restriction is that on the Ceres a filename
> was compatible with a Texts.Name.  This made command parameter scanning
> convenient.  The assumption is made by many commands, but is obviously no
> longer valid, since the introduction of installable file systems and the
> ports to other operating systems.  We have slowly been converting commands
> to accept Texts.String ("...") also for file names, but not all commands
> accept it yet.

"/" is the directory separator and must not be used in filenames.

NO/Bluebottle's FAT file system implementation follows M$'s FAT
documentation and therefore allows special characters in filenames.

Bernhard
--
Bernhard Egger, Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich