Enhancements to the Comet file system

I am proposing two enhancements to the Comet file system that would be invisible and completely compatible with existing Comet application software.

Add an extension to Comet Data Files: As everyone reading this blog knows all too well, the data portion of Comet files don't have an extension. Unfortunately Windows DOES NOT LIKE filenames without extensions; does not like them one bit. I have found it impossible to send Comet files as attachments to emails. Somewhere, either at the sending side or the receiving side, a DAT extension gets stuck on the filename. So let Comet put the DAT extension on the data file name. The idea is not without precedent. Comet invisibly appends an OBJ extension to object files even though the system uniformly refers to "programs" by their root name and almost never refers to them by their real name. And if you try to CREATE a file with an OBJ extension, Comet will bark at you.

Append CR/LF to the end of every record: When a program CREATEs a file, Comet would invisibly add two bytes to the record length and when a record is written to that file Comet would invisibly append a Carriage Return and a Line Feed to the end of the record.

These two changes would not have any effect on existing programs. Existing CREATEs READs and WRITEs would not be affected.

Comet file names and record lengths would not change. BUT you could look at Comet data files using a text editor and the Google desktop search tool would be able to look at Comet data files. These seem like big benefits for small changes.