Tilde in Program Files directory; ease of use

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

There are two problems here: 1) home directory vs. using fully qualified
path names. I'm going to experiment a bit more with that. 2) The ability
of XyWrite (DOS or Win) to reference C:\ProgramFiles. It's not, as I
first thought, the tilde. Once I fixed the hyphenation default, so that I
could type a tilde on the command line, I could do a directory of any
other folder with a tilde in the short name. But neither XyWrite for DOS
nor XyWin can read C:\PROGRA~1 correctly. If you type DIR c:\PROGRA~1 on
the command line, you get a "listing"--with no files listed. If you do
DIR C:\PROGRA~1\*.* or even C:\PROGRA~1\mqsa (mqsa being the full name of
one of my subfolders there), I get "File not found."
	And it's not that PROGRAMFiles has no files immediately in it; I created
a folder on a floppy with no files directly within the folder, and
several subfolders. I then renamed the first-level folder to have a long
file name. I could access that, and get accurate directories, from both
XyWin and XyDos, using the 8 & 3 name, with tilde. So it appears that
it's some nasty Microsoft "feature" in C:\ProgramFiles that makes it
unreadable to XyWrite (Win or DOS). Note that this folder is readable
from the DOS prompt in a DOS box. This is Win98, 1st ed. on my desktop
and 95A on the laptop, though I was using 95 OSR2 on the desktop up until
the first of this year, and had the same problem with XyWin.
	I just must comment, though I'll try to be brief, on Mr. Malkin's
points. I too am a writer and editor, and utterly left-brained mentally
(I not only think in words, I dream in them for the most part), though
physically left-handed. Thus I find GUIs totally unintuitable and
counterproductive for most chores, and love XyWrite (and DOS) for the
efficiency of the command line. But I don't think we can ever expect a
computer ("logic machine," or "logicker" would be a better name) to be as
easy to use as a car or a wshing machine, or even a sewing machine. They
are all one-task machines, or at most do a couple of things. A computer
system (i.e., PC, printer, modem) can replace a typewriter, a printing
press, a telegraph, a video-editing machine, even a musical instrument
(though as the daughter and granddaughter of professional musicians I
deplore all electronic and nonacustic methods of producing what purports
to be music). One simply has to know something about the inner workings
of anything that can do so many different things if one is to get the
most out of it. Furthermore, only those who understand both the machine
and the task it is trying to do will be able to find the best ways of
doing the task. (That's why he's so right about Word's inappropriateness
for writing and editing.) In some cases--the relational database model
leaps to mind, as do electonic style sheets--the computer lets us do
things that we never dreamed of before. People who say, "what's the least
I need to know to use this thing?" will never find out those new things.
Patricia