Brian D Chase <bdc@world.std.com> writes:

> 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.

	- Nathan