|
James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
So what if 10^36 is a large number? . . . How many sensible english descriptive phrases can be made with 10 characters? Not very many, and that is the problem. The problem is not running out of unique character combinations, it is running out of sensible descriptive contractions.
Who wants to type a 50-character-long command? We have something beyond the wildest dreams of the WinDoze, Mac, and Linux world (not to mention the DOS world): DESCRIPTIVE TEXT. We can have up to 50 characters, with no rules whatsoever, to describe what some QSYS.LIB object does.
Over a quarter of a century ago, when I was in high school, we had a district-wide student timeshare system. Running on multiplexed modems, we had 5 300-Baud lines and a 150-Baud line on each of 2 phone lines. The system used an obscure OS called MUSIC (McGill University System for Interactive Computing), running on an IBM 370/135. It had six-character filenames. The first character had to be a letter, an @-sign, a $-sign, or a #-sign; the other 5 could also be digits. And everybody's files, including private ones, were in one big common library.
We thought 300 baud was fast. We thought 6-character filenames were great, even with the possibility of different users' filenames colliding with each other. An operating system upgrade eventually got us longer filenames and separate private libraries (but still no hierarchical directory structure), and we thought that was downright incredible.
Then came RT11, RSTS, TRSDOS, CP/M, and PC/DOS, which all used 8.3 or 8/3 format filenames, and eventually hierarchical directories. And we all thought that was great.
Then came the Macintosh. Long filenames. With spaces. Fancy that. And of course, WinDoze had to be a copycat on that.
I remember a company I worked for back in the late 1980s. All the DOS machines were strict command-line boxes. And the boss set them all up so that all the common commands had one- or two-character synonyms, so that nobody had to type an 8-character command.
You want descriptive text to tell what an object is? Great! Put it in the descriptive text. That's what it's there for!
-- JHHL
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2024 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact [javascript protected email address].
Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.
midrange.com
