> Richard Maine wrote:

>> Gary Scott sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>
>>

>>>Richard Maine wrote:
>>>

>>>>Gary Scott sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>>>

>>>>>Nathan Seese wrote:
>>>>>

>>>>>>Hell, very few people who use Fortran have heard of folders.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>

>>>>>oh now...it appears to me that a very large number of Fortran users
>>>>>use either Unix or Windows nowadays, doncha think??

>>>>
>>>>
>>>>I think you completely missed Nathan's point. "Folder" is most
>>>>distinctly *NOT* a Unix term. To Unix folk (and plenty of Windows folk
>>>>as well, if they have been around long enough and.or if they use the
>>>>command line enough), those things are "directories" rather than
>>>>"folders."
>>>>
>>>>

>>>Folder is extremely commonly used terminology. In fact, the term
>>>"directory" is much less used at LM Aero. If I use the term directory,
>>>I sometimes have to stop and explain it. Many of the common tools we
>>>use such as Livelink use the term folders. It's pretty well engrained
>>>nowadays. And lots of those people use Fortran.

>>
>>
>> Well, I wasn't arguing about how many people used what terms. I was
>> just pointing out what Nathan was saying, and that using Unix or
>> Windows didn't particularly translate into referring to these things as
>> "folders".
>>
>> Your majority of LM Aero users must be pretty young, I'd deduce.
>> WIndows didn't start using that terminology until WIndows 95, and you
>> still need to use the "directory" terminology on the command line and
>> in the API, both of which are more directly related to Fortran than the
>> GUI. The "folder" terminology adheres more to the GUI, than to the
>> underlying structure; this is exemplified by some "special folders"
>> that show up in the GUI, but aren't necessarily actual directories in
>> the file system.
>>
>> In Unix, it is even more the case that, while the folder metaphor is
>> often used in GUIs, it almost never shows up on the command line, API,
>> or system internals. If you have to explain "directory" to people, they
>> must not spend much time on the command line or they'd be a bit puzzled
>> by such things as the cd and mkdir commands - not that Unix command
>> names don't tend towards puzzlement anyway, but they would be even more
>> so if you didn't know what a directory was.
>>
>> I wasn't really meaning to argue the point (though I seem to have
>> fallen into that above). It just seemed to me that you didn't even
>> understand what Nathan's point was, independent of the question of
>> agreeing with it. Or that's how I read your initial reply, and that's
>> what my answer was addressing.
>>

> Well, I went back and read and what I saw was (yes I read the context):
>
> "Hell, very few people who use Fortran have heard of folders."
>
> That seems pejorative towards users of Fortran in general. It may have
> been implying that most users of Fortran use Unix or something, but that
> was not evident from context, and in any event isn't true. It also
> isn't true that "folder" isn't commonly used in Unix tools. We use
> plenty of Unix-based tools that use the folder terminology. Those that
> continue to predominantly use command line environments are a dwindling
> minority in industry.
>
> Nearly all people that I know that use Fortran know and understand what
> a "folder" is. Most probably understand its equivalency to a directory,
> but the term has fallen out of favor as nearly all usage (and no, not
> overwhelmingly young as there are about 100000 out of the 140000 that
> are eligible for retirement in the next 5-10 years) is GUI based. Almost
> nobody uses command line tools any more. For application development,
> it is almost entirely IDE-based with lots of GUI CM tools to check
> in/out modules under development perform code reviews, release process
> approvals, etc.