just curious: why are file extensions mostly three characters?

[Wuming]

why not more or less? why is it that now we can have long filenames, but file extensions are still tree characters?

 

[Workin']

File extensions can be however long you want them to be....

It's just that some programs expect them to be certain things. That's how Windows "knows" what programs are associated with what files, and some of those associations haven't been changed since the "olden days" of 8.3 filenames. No need to change that which works, I guess.

 

[SiliconVandal]

I think they picked three because the combinations are endless for windows file extensions if its 3 characters. 2 isn't enough, 4 is possibly too much.

SV

 

It's just a throwback to the 8.3 file format from DOS. Most filenames are still 8.3 under even Win2k. That's why Win2k has tracert.exe instead of traceroute.exe, etc.

Also, understand that long filenames under Win9x is just a hack. They are really 8.3 filenames with special entries in the directory structure to fake long filenames.

I personally use a lot of extensions that are longer that 3 chars. .java, .class, .properties, .html, etc.

 

[Iron Woode]

3 letter file extensions go back way before DOS as most know it. Apple, Atari, even my old commodore vic20 uses 3 letter extensions. It was probably done to save space, 3 letters can id a lot of files. Remember that back then 8-32k of ram was considered serious ram. And floppies held 174k (more or less) of data.

eg: program file = prg
relative file = rel
sequencial file = seq