File path formats. 2400

Charles Shannon Hendrix

RISC OS didn't have file extensions. As Peter said, it used an internal number to represent the file type which wasn't part of the name (so you couldn't have two files with the same name but of different types).

It used a slash (or backslash, I forget which) to represent the dot in MSDOS file extensions when browsing MS DOS format discs.

Filenames also preserved case, but were case insensitive, and limited to 10 characters (though there were several hacks to remove the length limit, and I think it was officially removed in RISC OS 4).

The C compiler did things in a different way - it used different directories to keep the .c, .h and .o files (etc). So a UNIX style structure of: myproject-myfile.c myproject-myfile.h

would be represented on the RISCOS system as: myproject.c.myfile myproject.h.myfile

(remember that the '.' is the directory separator).

Java also caused problems, especially 1.2 which used $ in the clbutt names for inner clbuttes (which is the symbol for the root filesystem in RISCOS). I can't remember how it coped with that. A long filenames hack was pretty much a necessity for Java development.

Sam.