"File types"

[der Mouse]

>> Unix was the first system that I'd ever seen where the file name
>> implied a type.

> By "type", I mean:

> "This is a photograph"
> "This is a MSWord 'document'"
> "This is a TIFF image"
> "This is a C source file"
> "This is a C++ header file"

I don't think Unix file names imply types, though for some types they
do imply default types.  (Or, to put it another way, they imply types
in an advisory, not mandatory, sense.)

(And yes, I realize the above quotes are not from the same person.  In
fact, the one looks like a response to the other.)

> E.g., ages ago [...] I could do "asm foo.obj" if I had a perverse
> sense of humor *and*, as long as "foo.obj" contained valid "src
> code", the application would process it as such.

> But, nowadays, systems seem (excepting Macs?) to all tie some
> significance to the "extensions" tagged onto filenames.  E.g., they
> gag on files named "MyFile", "ReadMe", etc. because they can't infer
> the file type from the name (lacking a suitable "extension").

This does not describe any even vaguely Unixish system in my
experience.  All of them handle such things just fine - indeed, I have
a number of plain text documentation files named something.doc on my
home machines.

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