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Thursday, February 28, 2002
14:43 - Fume, fume, grumble, fume...

(top) link
Kris was just talking to one of our Manufacturing guys, who was flustered over a program that he had received from his Mac-using daughter; he had tried in vain to find a file with .exe on the name, that he could run. Kris was explaining how it works differently on the PC and the Mac. "For Windows," he said, "you have to have a .exe on the filename, otherwise it won't be an executable program."

"Well then, how does the Mac work with .exe files?"

"It doesn't. There is no such thing on the Mac. It just 'knows' that something is executable." It's a filesystem-level flag, which defines a file as an executable and associates its Type and Creator codes with the Desktop database. There is no filename extension necessary-- it's meaningless. Even the convention of putting .app on OS X app bundles is just that-- a convention. The executable flag can be set on bundles just as on anything else; the .app is just a marker that gets hidden, a leftover from NeXT. In AppleTalk networks, executable-ness and icons and associative metadata are all transferred seamlessly; no worrying about filenames and their extensions necessary. So your program can be called "Adobe Photoshop™ 6.0" instead of "photoshop.exe".

".exe is so 20th-century," Kris joked.

And the response, in a tone that was almost certainly not jocular: "Yeah, well... those will be the last words out of Apple's mouth when they shut their doors."

And he stomps off.

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© Brian Tiemann