Re: Stupid, Stupid Text Features [Was: Can't set creator type]
Re: Stupid, Stupid Text Features [Was: Can't set creator type]
- Subject: Re: Stupid, Stupid Text Features [Was: Can't set creator type]
- From: "John W. Baxter" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 12:58:26 -0800
On 2/24/2004 2:46, "Mr Tea" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
In the original thread, I reported a problem in Panther when using the
>
text returned from a dialog to set the creator type or file type of a
>
file. Basically, it can't be done without first performing a really
>
hairy coercion.
The underlying problem, IMHO, was the excessive cleverness of the original
Macintosh team, which elected to make use of "strings" which are really
numbers. While clever and mnemonic (usually) and all that, it's caused
problems for years.
TEXT, when used as a file type or AE Descriptor type or ... Is really just
the 4-byte number whose hex representation is
54455954
The idea worked reasonably well in Pascal, which already did the right thing
with 'TEXT'. C had to be extended (and the C headers had various
contortions over time to deal with it).
One could, of course, designate a file as text by naming it blah.txt, but
that wouldn't do for the rest of us. ;-)
--John
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