3 ms·
The most complex operation due to some klugey MS stuff is 7 pseudocode steps... if that's hellish, then engineering is not a good career choice. "What can go w
by ben509 8y ago
The most complex operation due to some klugey MS stuff is 7 pseudocode steps... if that's hellish, then engineering is not a good career choice.
"What can go wrong with long filenames? Give some space to your imagination..."
They can get out of sync, and then they're going to float around until a long-filename aware system clears them out. Shockingly, systems that aren't aware of a new standard aren't aware of the new standard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've been working on a language for handling data structures much like this, and have some preliminary notes on a strategy for handling this scenario: https://tenet-lang.org/versioning.html https://tenet-lang.org/versioning.html
- anyfoo 8y agoYeah. You can give Microsoft a lot of crap, but what never ceases to amaze me is how inventive they were in keeping everything as compatible as possible, which they usually (successfully, mostly) pursued at all cost. Of course, that came with a high price, in terms of complexity and kludginess.
- ben509 8y agoIt's pretty interesting because in many cases the software evolved faster than anyone could keep up with, and there are large portions of backwards compatibility that I suspect were mostly accomplished through trial and error, especially when it comes to their layout algorithms. When they opened up the Office file formats, they wrote an XML spec that corresponds to the fields in the various binary formats. And there are sections of it where the specification is simply, "this should be formatted the way MS Word 5.1 does it."
- plussed_reader 8y agoAnd then they released WindowsME, with broken memory management.