14 character limitation in filenames

[David S. Herron]

In article <1991Feb02.232049.17438 at scuzzy.in-berlin.de> src at scuzzy.in-berlin.de (Heiko Blume) writes:
>allbery at NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
>>"Silliness"?  I still fail to understand why everyone wants to be able to
>>create files with humongous names --- I don't enjoy typing 14 character file
>>names (but don't want to decrease that size, there *is* a tradeoff here), the
>>30-plus-character names I've seen in use on some BSD systems don't appeal at
>>all.

I generally don't personally use file names more than about 20-30 characters.
Things like the <ESC>-to-complete-file-names help a lot in that regard ...

Looooooong file names *do* give the possibility for software to use all
that extra room for expansion in interesting ways.  The reason you might
want to put data into file names are for things like using the file system
as an index to a data base.

No I don't have any software around which does that.  But it's nice to
know that it can be done, no?

Supporting FLEXNAMES in the file system is useful in exactly the same
way as putting FLEXNAMES in the compiler is.

What I wanna know is why there should be a limit to file name length
in the first place?
-- 
<- David Herron, an MMDF & WIN/MHS guy, <david at twg.com>
<- Formerly: David Herron -- NonResident E-Mail Hack <david at ms.uky.edu>
<-
<-	MS-DOS ... The ultimate computer virus.