[Python-ideas] My objections to implicit package directories

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 1:45 AM, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
> Yes. On what platform are you? On unixy platforms filename extensions are just a naming convention that can just as easily be used with directories.

IIUC that's how almost all filesystems treat them. However desktop
software often assigns specific meanings to them -- the user can
configure these, but there's a large set of predefined bindings too,
and many key applications also play this game (since there is,
frankly, not much else to go by -- some important file types are not
easily guessable by reading their content, either because it's some
esoteric binary format, or because it's something too universal, like
XML).

I know that's how it works on Windows and Mac, but I believe the Linux
desktop things (the things I kill off or at lest ignore as soon as I
log in :-) have the same idea.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)