Gavin writes:

>Jeff gives away:
>>Another consideration is that you can supply "!varname" in the middle
>>of a filename passed to fopen.  If we make the APIs unaware of escaping
>>rules, how do we: a) retain this functionality, or b) support "!" in
>> filenames?
>
>Yeah, but this is so amazingly obscure that I'm not sure more than two or
>three people who read this list even know you can do this.  It's
>always struck me as a bizarre feature.  Does anyone actually use it?
>Do you know why it was put into FOPEN in the first place?

Count me as one of those who knows about and *uses* this feature. We use it
to allow our software to be installed, run from, etc a variable accounting
structure. This also allows multiple copies of the same application to be
on the same system without changing anything but variable names.

We used to get the same functionality with file equations, but with large
application systems (>200 programs) this is too unwieldly.

Please...don't break this feature.

duane percox