Re: [9fans] lures

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 10:34:13AM -0400, Michael Baldwin wrote:
>
> yeah, that's what i like about geoff.  if you can't have animated
> discussions of such fringe stuff as cursor keys vs. mouse or spaces in
> filenames on 9fans, then it would be a duller world.

The clincher is that the space is useful both as a separator of
command line arguments and as a joiner of filename "words".  Seeing
as even Micahel Baldwin does not suggest using spaces as path
separators (why not?) I would be tempted to go along with the school
of thought that proposes using a teeny dot in filenames.

The rationale being that long filenames, GUIs and Internationalisation
are all the _new_ rage and may as well be lumped into a single
paradigm change.

That we should need a keyboard key for the new pseudospace (it was
very useful in Wang Word Processors, others may remember it from
MultiMate days) in as convenient a position as the present space
bar, well, that is a little harder to address.

Also, I think it was dhog suggesting proportional spacing fonts in
program source (I shudder!) but in my mind a diminutive dot would
look nice as a linking space in the proportional space representation
of a long file name.

Finally, the space as a command line argument separator could be
sacrificed, but the result would not be aesthetically pleasing, in
my opinion.  And the diminutive dot would look wrong in this context,
specially if using a proportional font.

To give Michael his due, spaces in filenames can no longer be
suppressed.  But if they become very common, it will become more
convenient to use a GUI than command line composition.  That will
be a sad day.

++L

PS:  It's tempting to dig up the arguments in favour of Oberon's flat
filespace, I wonder how it would be received by the proponents of a
namespace _based_ on file paths :-)