Re: Lest we forget
With the proliferation of file types extension are a simple way to identify them even without a GUI to display an icon (if one is available), and without having to process every file to try to understand what it is (not every file has an easy header to read), or even to tell what a text file is - a .conf file tells you it has a different use than a .c or .txt one.
The only other option would be to attach metadata to the file in the filesystem - some OS did (Apple and OS/2, IIRC), but usually those attributes are not portable and are lost when a file is moved across different systems. Especially, good luck with the poor file attribute systems from the 1970s... when there were only two types of files, executable and text ones... ah, if only we could save images into text files and perform image editing with vi!
