Re: Stupid quoting...

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

To be fair, Microsoft did not invent the concept of filenames with spaces. Even UNIX has, I believe, always allowed them, though you risked running into buggy scripts misbehaving if you used them. And really, filenames with spaces are only a nuisance in a text-based command line scripting environment, and only then because someone early on decided to use space rather than some other metacharacter as the only available delimiter between command arguments in scripts.

For regular users who aren't writing shell scripts, long-form filenames mean a document's name is the same as its title, which is hugely helpful from a user interface point of view: "February Marketing Budget" is much more self-documenting as a filename than "febmkbgt" or whatever they would have had to choose in the old days (and remember, UNIX had a 14-character filename size limit in the early days; long filenames weren't introduced until BSD.)

I view filenames as primarily for human consumption, so they should act the way humans expect names to act. Computers can just use inode numbers or file IDs to refer to files (like, say, SHA1 hashes) -- the pretty names are all for the benefit of us meat-brained entities.

Then again, that means I also think case sensitivity in filenames was a bad design choice. To use your "people's names" analogy, if you ask any random person whether "Billy-bob Thornton" and "Billy-Bob Thornton" are the same name, they'll almost always say yes; most people don't consider capital letters and lower-case letters to be different letters, just different forms of the same letters. And I know how popular *that* opinion is around here...

-Steve