I'm no MS advocate either, but I don't really buy the argument that this is not in the OS.

First off, spaces in paths have been available for years. I remember using them on DOS 5 and OS/2 2.1. Unix/Linux has always had the ability to put spaces in the path as well. So Windows isn't doing anything new here. What is new here is the advocacy to use spaces.

I look at this as I would any other design that will inherently cause users (in the case of an OS, this includes not just end-users, but developers on that OS) problems. Funny thing is, they could have avoided this by officially endorsing spaces, but using a directory such as C:\Programs instead of C:\Program Files as the directory for default installations. 99% of the problems with spaces would have gone away. Instead, they consciously chose to break everyone in order to enforce their idea that spaces should be allowed. What this means in practical use is that CMD.EXE is deprecated, as is any other non-GUI method of launching applications.

It's a design decision by MS that causes this pain. It means everyone else, especially those writing batch files, needs to change their code. It breaks backwards compatability, which I believe they did on purpose. And thus I'd say the problem is in the OS.

Unfortunately, it is what it is, and everyone who develops for Windows now (well, for the last 10 years now) must eat the cost of the switch. The market (generally) demands it.

I know that, at work, we were still eating the cost of conversion in 1998. And even today, there is a small overhead of having to constantly make sure we quote everything properly in our batch files. What a headache. Our build tools explicitly say "no spaces in their paths" for building. What we ship to end-users must support spaces, but it's too expensive for us to support the spaces internally. Yet another Microsoft-tax - this time on development.

Update: Some may wonder what a rant (yes, a rant ;->) on MS is doing here. It's not. It's a rant on design issues, and how they permeate to everyone that relies on your code and design. Care needs to always be taken that you break your users only when there is no other way to get them the behaviour desired, and I think that simply changing the default location for new software just a tiny bit would have reduced that break measurably. I have no issues with spaces in filenames per se (as I said, I've been doing this for years prior to Win95's arrival). Just the design of how to implement it.

In reply to Re^3: The Evil Embedded Space by Tanktalus
in thread The Evil Embedded Space by Intrepid

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