My company uses ArcGIS and has a project and data file naming standards in place and (for the most part) followed. Something that has always bothered me about he naming standards is that it mandates starting all project and data file names with the project number - an eight digit number. I've always held the belief that naming GIS files starting with numbers is a bad thing, and have had (especially with GRIDS) processes fail because of the file name.
I'm looking to amend the corporate standards to drop the project number requirement, however I cannot find much in the way of documentation on why "numbers as a first character" in filename is a bad thing.
Can anyone point me in the right direction as far as resources to support this argument?
Answer
This convention is just begging to bring out bugs from bad command interpreters. (It is all too easy to confuse initial digits with a number.)
Your software's success today in avoiding such bugs is no guarantee that they won't appear in future releases. This has happened multiple times, over decades, with ESRI's GIS software. This behavior has been extensively reported and amply documented. You need look no further than ESRI's own user forums, which date back a decade. (Deeper searches of old listserver archives will take you back even earlier, to around 1995.) Interesting Google searches include
"GRD ERROR" site:forums.esri.com
filename 8.3 site:forums.esri.com
Together these will provide around a hundred actual examples of the problems such filenames have caused and potentially could cause again.
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