Re: Wonderful ProDOS patch!

[tdrew@OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Frank M. Lin)]

>>Just keep it away from my machine. I think it's a stupid idea.

It is a patch, you do not have to apply it.  

>     These are my thoughts exactly. Simply hacking ProDOS so that it seems
>to support a character set that is different from its defined set is just
>plain stupid. Lots of programs reasonably and rightly assume that ProDOS
>file names contain a specific set of characters, and they cannot be
>guaranteed to work correctly, given a set of characters they don't expect.

Stupid maybe, but it's an option that will make ProDOS more flexible.

>     For example, what if a text editor author decided, "I like filetype
>$C1 for storing my text files. I don't care if they're supposed to be
>pictures, I wanna' use $C1 for text". So, you write a nice letter, and the
>text editor happily saves it as filetype $C1. Later, you double-click on 
>the file, and your paint program runs - and then crashes. It was expecting
>a picture, but it found nothing of the sort. This is exactly the same risk
>you take when redefining the ProDOS filename charcter set that any
>reasonable programmer can see cannot be redefined.

I think it's a little different, the orignal valid characters are like
file type $C1, the new valid characters (, space... etc) are like aux
types.  Or, more like original invalid characters are like file type
bad blocks, now you use file type bad blocks to store datas.  Some 
program will not like it...

Anyway, I think it's a cool option patch which you can apply if you like.

>     Of course, you can still do as you wish. I just think it's a stupid
>hack with far too many problems that haven't been thought out.

Yeah...