From: dic5340@hertz.njit.edu (David Charlap)
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc
Subject: Re: tell me i'm wrong (braindead design in os2)
Date: 20 Nov 92 21:42:15 GMT
Organization: New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, N.J.

In article <1egn4dINNklu@agate.berkeley.edu> jp1ek@sunc.shef.ac.uk writes:
>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:

You're upset that OS/2 has a file system which is compatible with
MS-DOS.  Sorry, I like it this way.

>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....

You can type lower-case filenames if you want.  If you use the FAT
file system, you can place a "/l" option in your DIRCMD variable to
make them show up as lowercase.  HPFS will store lowercase filenames.
Case isn't sensitive, so you can type lowercase when uppercase is on
the disk.  This is not Unix.

With either file system, the WPS will allow longer filenames, and will
store the case properly.

>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?

No, it can't be switched, although some applications (like the GNU
utilities and other things written in GCC) will accept both slashes.
This is done because most DOS apps (and many OS/2 apps) use "/" as a
delimiter for command switches.

Again, it's necessary for MS-DOS sessions to be compatible with DOS
apps.  And I really don't want to require one convention for OS/2 apps
and another one for DOS apps on the same machine.

In case you didn't know, drdos and early ms-dos did allow you to
change the directory separator, but it caused more problems than it
solved, because applications often had the default (MS-DOS) convention
hard-coded into them.

>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).

Hostile?  Why do you even care?  If you open a file as text, it gets
translated for you anyway.  Unix uses LF, the Mac uses CR, DOS and
OS/2 use CR-LF.  I fail to see why any one is more braindead than any
other.  Why not provide an index to line lengths and have no
delimiters (like IBM mainframes) if you wish?  Different systems are
going to have different conventions and if you can't handle it, then
you have a serious problem with your attitude.

The entire world is not Unix.  As a matter of fact, only a small
percentage of it is.  And most of it doesn't care that they're
different.  Surprise.
-- 
  |)  David Charlap          | .signature confiscated by FBI due to
 /|_  dic5340@hertz.njit.edu | an ongoing investigation into the
((|,)                        | source of these .signature virusses
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