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Comment by nas | Hacker News Reader

Slightly offtopic, but sometimes I wonder about the number of man-years wasted because Microsoft decided to use "Program Files" instead of "Programs". "Yes, you can finally put spaces in your file names. Well done. That doesn't make it a good idea."

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Funny thing is, if Microsoft had used a directory without a space I wonder how many apps would exists where they didn't handle path names with spaces correctly.

What would the computing world look like if every program were as temperamental about spaces in filenames as, say, MATLAB (or any CAD software).

"No mom, you can't use spaces in the filename. Why? Because developers are annoyed by how normal people think."

I read that Microsoft put a space in there on purpose so that programs would be forced to deal with it. Folders on Windows can have different names depending on the install language. Even if it was "Programs" in English, it might be a name with space in another language.

Perhaps they should have named it Prøgrâm Filës, just to be sure.

I don't think Windows has a codepage with all of those characters in it...

Oh, to go back to the 8.3 days... 11 ASCII characters is enough to name your files, right?

12 characters, if you count the dot.

Which OS was that?

I think by 8.3, he meant DOS 8.3 ?

8.3 refers to: 8 chars, a dot, 3 chars, which was the limit for filenames.

You can have north of 200 characters, so long you don't mind \ every 9 characters or so.

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