Re: [PATCH 2/5] [mingw]: Have compiled-file-name produce valid names.

[Eli Barzilay <eli@barzilay.org>]

[Second attempt, my Emacs has unfortunate issues with Ludovic's
name...]


An hour ago, Andy Wingo wrote:
> On Mon 02 May 2011 22:58, ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
> 
> > Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:
> >
> >> Basically I think the plan should be to add scm_from_locale_path,
> >> scm_from_raw_path, etc to filesys.[ch], and change any
> >> pathname-accepting procedure in Guile to accept path objects,
> >> producing them from strings when given strings, and pass the
> >> bytevector representation to the raw o/s procedures like `open'
> >> et al.
> >
> > Seems to like a disjoint type “just for Windows” would be
> > overkill, no?
> 
> Maybe you're right; hummm!  I have added a kind racketeer on Cc; perhaps
> if he has time, he might have some thoughts in this regard.  :-)

I don't think that I can contribute much -- I'm mostly looking at
these things from a user's point of view...  Roughly speaking (mostly
because I don't know what the issues that you're up against), our path
values have "just paths" for whatever the OS wants -- so on Windows
they might have either backslashes or slashes (since Racket accepts
both).

To write portable code we don't have a `file-separator' thing,
instead, we have `build-path' that combines two paths with the right
separator.  Similarly, we have `split-path' to split up a path to the
directory part and the last part.  I think that it's generally better
this way, since it represents the higher level operation rather than
fiddling with the semantics of where and how to put separators
directly (but this is not some religious issue, just seems to me like
it would be more convenient).

Also, we have cases where we want something that looks like a portable
path (for example, naming relative file names in `require') -- for
those we use /-separated strings that are limited to "safe"
characters.  And related, in cases where we want to encode path in
code (for example, some macro that wants to generate a path), we'll
use strings or byte strings, with the latter more common for lower
level things.

(But I'm just rambling now, I haven't slept in N days -- so feel free
to ignore me...)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!