Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!boulder!ccncsu!ncr-fc!ncr-sd!greg
From: greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Greg Noel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: arp CD command change???
Message-ID: <932@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 23 Feb 89 01:00:26 GMT
References: <8902131846.AA21527@postgres.Berkeley.EDU> <3434@sugar.uu.net>
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 25

In article <3434@sugar.uu.net> peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) presents
a dissenting view to Matt Dillon's prefered Amiga file naming conventions:
>.... UNIX file names with an optional prepended device name would have been
>better. Best would be something like:
>	//dev/path/file

Obviously, this is a religious issue, but I think an even better syntax
could be borrowed from MIT's Project Athena, where they have a problem of
potentially thousands of file systems that can be attached.  The syntax
could be:
       ~dev/path/file
that is, a device (or ASSIGN name) would have a leading squiggle, and the
example would be equivalent to dev:path/file.  It's only one character
longer and finesses many of the other syntax problems -- for example, to
add a file name to a directory component, even if it is a device, just add
a slash and the file name: "~dev" + "/" + "file" ==> "~dev/file" or
"~dev/dir" + "/" + "file" ==> "~dev/dir/file".  A file name beginning with
a slash is relative to the current device; that is, "/a/path/name" is
equivalent to "~curdev/a/path/name."  It's simple and uniform.

I won't argue whether Unix's "." and ".." should be used, although I do
prefer them.  I do think that "" for the current directory is not the
best possible -- is ""/file a legal name?  (I don't think so.)
-- 
-- Greg Noel, NCR Rancho Bernardo   Greg.Noel@SanDiego.NCR.COM  or  greg@ncr-sd