Date   : Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:13:31 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: Spitting expletives

On 27/07/2010 09:05, Pete Turnbull wrote:

> In the case of a BASIC program, it would logically be the
 > interpreter of choice.

Which, logically enough, would be VB... :-)


The pain, and this would affect RISC OS too, is when different, 
incompatible, files are given the same extension, hence my use of 
".basic". Probably it should be ".bbcbasic" to further distinguish!


> True.  Which is why UNIX is better :-)  My pet hate is Windows
 > assuming everything with a .doc extension must belong in Word.

You mean like when you start a RISC OS computer and it is just assumed 
that text files load into !Edit and image files load into !Paint; until 
you load !Zap or something and it overwrites the association so files 
load into !Zap. But if you run both at the same time, the one a file 
loads into (if simply double-clicked) appears to be down to which bit of 
software gets to see the load file WimpMessage first. ;-)


For .doc, it is because in this day and age, .doc files are associated 
with Word. I say associated because mine open in OpenOffice. :-)

The pain here is mostly from poseur ShareWare authors back in the early 
'90s who decided their ASCII text helpfiles were too good to be .txt 
files, so they called them .doc. Erroneously, really. I mean, shall we 
start referring to web pages as .ocm [*] just for the hell of it? Sure, 
you can tweak Apache to handle it, just as you can tweak most filetype 
associations, but 99% of hosts would tell you to use .htm(l) and shut up.


I guess, in a way, file format identifiers are both a blessing and a 
curse. Useful, until you get multiple things that are logically the same 
"basic programs" but which are very different...



Best wishes,

Rick.

* - .ocm for Over Complicated Markup ;-)

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...