While not having time to ponder everything you mentioned, this one
does present problems:

<snip>

>Issues:
>-------
>1) intrinsics like FLABELINFO, FOPEN, FRENAME, (more) expect a delimited
>filename and support the MPE-escaped syntax.  Today an application can
>FOPEN("./abc$zz ") and open ./abc.  Tomorrow the $ would be considered part
>of the name so fopen would try to open "./abc$zz" (assuming blank is still
>not a legal name char).  Is this OK since most applications use space, null
>or cr as the filename terminator.  However, I know that the shell uses a
>"$" as a name terminator.  (yes this make the Java work more interesting!,
>and in MKS' defense, we recommended that char to them, for some reason?)

In the "brave new world" of Microsoft Long Filename support, a 'blank' is in
fact a valid filename character (I use it A LOT anymore when naming files).  I
truly believe I understand the ramifications of including a space in the filename
for many of the parsers out there, but for "NT Interoperability" (and other OS's),
the space needs to be included as a valid character.

Regards,
Michael L Gueterman
Easy Does It Technologies
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.editcorp.com
voice: (509) 943-5108
fax:   (509) 946-1170