Smarter Handling of File Names

Here’s another annoyance that I probably encounter 50 times a week and will probably NEVER develop the necessary habit to avoid:

If a file is saved under a name containing a period, such as a name containing the abbreviation “Mr., Dr., St.”, no matter how many characters follow the period Audacity will assume that everything after the period is the user’s choice of filename extension even though a specific file type such as WAV or OGG has been chosen for the save operation. It will respond with: "You are about to save a OGG file (or other type) file with the name “Mr. [rest of user’s name entry]. Normally these files end in “.ogg”, and some programs will not open files with nonstandard extensions. Are you sure you want to save the file under this name. [YES] [NO]”

I know of no other program that confuses the presence of a period in the file name with an attempt to over-ride the default file name extension. It seems to me that if by no other means, Audacity should understand that if more than 3 characters follow the period, it is NOT an attempt to over-ride the default filename extension.

When I encounter this error, I click YES and then go back and correct the filename extension. Clicking NO would cause my carefully composed filename to be discarded and I would have to recompose it, remembering this time to type the filename extension at the end. But it’s a nuisance to do this and a weirdness that IME in decades of using PCs, is unique to Audacity.

If I do not go back and rename the file, adding the filename extension, the file has no extension at all and appears to Windows to have a file name extension consisting of the all the remaining characters in the filename, so for example, the filename is “Dr” and the filename extension is “.Jones - 5-1-2012 seminar” instead of the filename being “Dr.Jones - 5-1-2012 seminar” and the filename extension being “.ogg”, ".mp3, “.wav”, etc. even though it was explicitly saved in one of those formats

It’s one of the hassles of cross-platform programming if Windows is supported.
Windows relies on the file extension to tell it the file type. Other operating systems don’t.
On other operating systems you can have a file called “Mr.Smith” as a PCM WAV file with no file extension and it will still work perfectly well as an audio file. Windows can’t do that, it needs to have a file extension to identify the file type. In order to accommodate this limitation of Windows without imposing unnecessary limitations on other platforms it will prompt the user if they use a “non-standard” name but will still be allowed to save it with any name that is legal on their operating system.

Similar issues exist with many other cross-platform applications. This complaint should go to Microsoft.