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[Doug McNutt]

At 09:22 -0700 6/10/08, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>At 10:22 AM -0500 6/10/08, Eugene wrote:
>>Many apps do poorly with filenames containing underlines.
>>Even though lots of people prefer to use an underline as
>>simple replacement for a space character, apps tend to see
>>the underline as another alphanumeric character and fails
>>to see it as a word delimiter.  By default, just about every
>>Unix editor does this (including vi and emacs) as well as
>>most GUI apps.
>
>That is interesting as I've used the underbar for half of forever on UNIX, VMS, Windows, various versions of the Mac Operating systems, and a bunch of other OS's.    I've NEVER had a single problem with any program using it.  I would be interested in knowing exactly what you're trying to describe here.
>
>Zane

The point is that the underline character IS NOT a delimiter. In UNIX it's used in place of the space that IS a delimiter. The whole point is to distinguish different file names in a list without having to quote filenames or escape each space that's part of a file name.

I think Zane would like to see an example of some English text which does use the underscore as a delimiter. Something like underscore as a unary minus operator in APL, for instance.

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