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From: Eric Sosman <esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: A strange behaviour of a File property
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:18:03 -0500
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On 11/13/2011 3:50 PM, Andreas Leitgeb wrote:
> Eric Sosman<esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid>  wrote:
>>       Speaking as a person who wrote code that tried to mediate
>> between VMS ("structured") file names and Unix ("just glob it") paths,
>> I am here to tell you that there are many subtle traps.  Version numbers
>> inevitably got garbled, if not "in translation" then "in manipulation"
>> on the other side of the fence.  The fact that the parent directory of
>>
>> 	SYS$DISK:[USERS.ERIC.PROJECT]README.TXT;22
>> was
>> 	SYS$DISK:[USERS.ERIC]PROJECT.DIR;1
>>
>> baffled innumerable Unixoid programs that thought they could just "take
>> everything before the rightmost separator" to get the parent's name.
>> Anybody who thinks the mapping is half a day's work has got another
>> think coming -- and weeks of unplanned labor, too.  I've got the scars.
>
> I'm still wondering, how this effort was even worth it.

     In hindsight, you're right. We should have just ditched the
VMS port of our product on the grounds that the platform was too
ugly and/or baroque and/or expensive and/or unfamiliar.

     But, alas! We allowed ourselves to be influenced by the market,
instead of holding to our ideological purity. The fact that VMS was
the second most popular platform for our product (in one quarter it
actually took the top spot) caused the bean counters to insist that
we support it. Stupid bean counters!

> Dinosaur systems [...]

     Note that Unix is even older than VMS.

-- 
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid