std.path.getName(): Screwy by design?

[Don]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Don" <nospam at nospam.com> wrote in message 
> news:ikj7n9$1sg2$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:01:49 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>>>> People don't always realize it, but Windows really is the same way. It's
>>>> really only the user-level applications like Explorer that ever care 
>>>> about
>>>> "extension", and even then the extension is always just "everything 
>>>> after
>>>> the last dot in the filename". Anything beyond that is merely tradition 
>>>> and
>>>> convention. The only real difference is that windows has no standard
>>>> mechanism for looking at the content of the file to help determine its 
>>>> type.
>> No, it tries hard to make it look that way, but it's evolved from a system 
>> where extensions were fundamental.
>> Even now, an 8.3 filename still exists for every file.
>>
> 
> The existence of an 8.3 fallback doesn't really have any bearing on it. And 
> neither does pedigree. If there is still a fundamental distinction with 
> extension, it's nothing more than a detail of how the filesystem spec 
> defines its data storage and completely abstracted away by the filesystem 
> driver.
> 
> Name one case in windows where some sort of distinction between filename and 
> extension actually makes a real tangible difference versus unix, that 
> doesn't merely amount to convention (there's zero technical hurdle in the 
> way of a windows program considering ".bashrc" to be extensionless) or 
> manually re-implementing part of the filesystem spec (heck, unix has FAT32 
> and NTFS drivers, too).

??????
It ALWAYS makes a difference. For example, only .exe and .com files are 
executable.
On unix, the filename is just a name. Nothing more. By contrast, the 
Windows extension actually matters. They're completely different.

No, it's not "just a convention". It's completely enforced. You cannot 
execute a file if it has the wrong extension.
On Windows, the extension is used to identify the file. Just as unix
uses the magic number at the start of the file.