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

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Noah,

Noah Lavine <noah.b.lavine@gmail.com> writes:

> The reason this strangeness enters is that path strings are actually
> lists (or vectors) encoded as strings. Conceptually, the path
> ~/Desktop/Getting\ a\ Job is the list ("~" "Desktop" "Getting a Job").
> In this representation, there are no escapes and no separators. It
> always seemed cleaner to me to think about it that way.

Agreed.

However, POSIX procedures deal with strings, so you still need to
convert to a string at some point.  So I think there are few places
where you could really use anything other than strings to represent file
names—unless all of libguile is changed to deal with that, which seems
unreasonable to me.

MIT Scheme’s API goes this route, but that’s heavyweight and can hardly
be retrofitted in a file-name-as-strings implementation, I think:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/mit-scheme-ref/Pathnames.html>.

> I said this is similar to the (web) module because of all of the
> discussion there of how HTTP encodes data types in text, and how it's
> better to think of a URI as URI type rather than a special string,
> etc.

Yes.

Thanks,
Ludo’.