From: Mike Hall <mghall@...>
Date: 2002-04-11T00:13:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Addition to file.c (File.extension)

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> |YANAGAWA Kazuhisa wrote:
> |> Uh, but that seems too dosish for me....  Nowadays there's so many
> |> people who lives on Windows environments, and they don't doubt `.ext'
> |> is called `extension', but also there's those who are familiar to more
> |> generic `suffix'.

> |I vote it.

> "suffix" maybe better than "extension", but it too have same ambiguity.
> Notice it's "File.suffix", not "FileName.suffix".

This is a fun can of worms!

Maybe we're going about this the wrong way?  
All I want to do is separate a generic file path into:
	- directory
	- basename 
	- extension or suffix

The first two currently exist as clones of UNIX shell commands.
Convenient, but not always useful.

What if we had a new Ruby method that did what we want?
Maybe a version of File.split which returns [dir, root, suffix]?
Then we don't have to name it!   :-)

(Although File.split always gets me, because I expect an array 
of directory components).

FWIW: Tcl uses 'file dirname', 'file rootname', and 'file extension'.

--
Mike Hall
http://www.enteract.com/~mghall