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

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Don" <nospam at nospam.com> wrote in message 
news:iknnq3$1neu$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.
>

Because windows occasionally cares about the extention doesn't imply it 
isn't part of the filename.