>> I was thinking more of AFS.  Back in my college days we used to run AFS on
>> our computing center NeXTSTEP, Ultrix, DEC OSF/1, and Solaris systems.
>> I'm a bit fuzzy minded now, but I'm pretty sure AFS actually used the "@"
>> character in symbolic links to expand to a machine architecture indicator.
>
>	Not @ alone, but rather the string @sys, which expands to
>things like sun4x_56, sgi_62, hp700_ux90, i386_nbsd1, m68k8k_nbsd1,
>...... While it can be useful, at MIT we find that it's too easy to
>abuse; packages that make use of such a construct fail when moved out
>of AFS, or when various types of binary compatibility are in use. So
>it's a neat hack, but the implications are really sort of ugly.

well then...i think at this point, this thread can be killed.  i
think.  there enough counter examples to my silly idea from last night
as to say that it was "not well thought out".

i promise i'll have a better idea next time.  :)

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