[strictfp]

But all programs must make exceptions for these entries. Imagine trying to add a third magic filename, '...', for the grandparent for example. You would have a lot of coding to do. Not really possible. It would have been better to mark the dirs as special somehow rather than having each program have the convention programmed in.

[caf]

...and of course even the kernel had to have exceptions for them anyway - it knew they were special because it had to stop userspace from unlink()ing or rename()ing them.