[Oberon] Re: Oberon digest, Vol 1 #39 - 5 msgs

[Charles Angelich]

>Message: 5
>From: "Bernhard Egger" <egger at inf.ethz.ch>
>To: <oberon at inf.ethz.ch>
>Subject: Re: [Oberon] Oberon filenames
>Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 10:46:57 +0200
>Reply-To: oberon at inf.ethz.ch
>
>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.

If BlueBottle or any other version of Oberon is to co-exist on a DOS
FAT file system then "\" would also need to be disallowed as a filename
character.

Microsoft dropped this filename incompatibility onto DOS and Windows users
with the long filename glitch making use of DOS extremely difficult for
those who used both OS. :-\

At the very least a utility to convert illegal filenames backwards to what
existing installs of Oberon can work with would be required if it is not
the intention to cut all existing users out of the `loop'.



Charles Angelich

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