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- Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!ames!agate!athena!ucbked
- From: ucbked@athena (Earl H. Kinmonth)
- Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc
- Subject: tell me i'm wrong (braindead design in os2)
- Date: 19 Nov 1992 18:41:17 GMT
- Organization: Centre for Japanese Studies, Univ. of Sheffield
- Lines: 25
- Distribution: world
- Message-ID: <1egn4dINNklu@agate.berkeley.edu>
- Reply-To: jp1ek@sunc.shef.ac.uk
- NNTP-Posting-Host: athena.berkeley.edu
-
- i have just started reading about os2 and have bought a copy to play
- with. so far i've noticed three things that bother me:
-
- a) file names are always shown in upper case. is os2 case insensitive?
- is upper case required? do ibm programmers have six fingers (one for
- the shift key)? are they still thinking in terms of the o26/o29
- keypunches and bcd coding? reading os2 takes me back to my first
- programming experiences in the early 1960s. i thought os2 was a modern
- system oriented to the future....
-
- b) path separation is always shown with the back(assward) slash (\). is
- this hard wired or can it be switched (as in drdos, early msdos)? do
- system calls accept both / and \ as in dos or is one stuck with this
- braindead convention? if nothing else it makes programming in c that
- much more troublesome?
-
- c) os2 uses the braindead and redundant CR/LF convention from msdos. do
- os2 utilities work the text files that have only line feeds or must one
- run unix files through a filter? programming utilities to work with
- either convention is trivial, but for some reason (ideological?) it is
- not done (cpp in Borland c and c++ is a classic example of user-hostile
- programming).
- --
- earl h. kinmonth, centre for japanese studies, university of sheffield,
- sheffield, england s10 2tn jp1ek@sunc.sheffield.ac.uk
-