Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!elroy!jato!herron.uucp!jbrown
From: jbrown@herron.uucp (Jordan Brown)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: legal group names (was Re: Results of news.software.c newsgroup poll)
Message-ID: <58@herron.uucp>
Date: 29 May 89 20:14:23 GMT
References: <428@qtc.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov
Lines: 24

In article <428@qtc.UUCP>, battan@qtc.UUCP (Jim Battan) writes:
(Actually, one of the people who responded to him wrote...)
> >(or just .bc, or .b-n-c, or .b+c if all known operating systems will
>                              ^^^^   

> I know at least one o.s. that will _not_ accept this.  Please do not
> use this as a name.

MS-DOS will hiccup on this and several other names.  Unfortunately, there
are already newsgroups with names that offend it.  (There's something
like comp.sys.aux which MSDOS thinks is a reference to the AUXillary device,
and comp.lang.c++ which has punctuation that MSDOS doesn't like in a file
name.)  Of course, it's also offended by names > 8 (or 11 maybe) characters
long, but that's easy to translate around.

As somebody working on an MSDOS news system (don't ask me for it), I sure
wish that all newsgroup names were acceptable MSDOS file names.  However,
I realize that this isn't the case, and isn't likely.  (Besides, due to
stupidity in MSDOS, *no* name is guaranteed safe because device names are
recognized in all contexts, even with extensions and as directories.)

I haven't decided how to handle comp.lang.c++ yet, but I'm assuming that
I'll have to handle it somehow.  I think it's unlikely that I'll be able
to talk people into significantly restricting the punctuation allowed.