Re: Filename encoding

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:42:57 +0000
> From: Chris Vine <chris@cvine.freeserve.co.uk>
> Cc: mhw@netris.org, guile-user@gnu.org
> 
> I am not sure what you mean, as I am not talking about internal use.

Then I probably didn't understand why you mentioned the external
encoding.  How is that relevant to the issue at hand?

I'm saying that Guile does needs to know how to convert a file name
when it needs to pass it to library functions and system calls.  So
The POSIX system calls may be "encoding agnostic", but Guile simply
cannot be.

> As it happens (although this is beside the point) using a byte value or
> sequence in a filename which the operating system reserves as the '/'
> character, for a purpose other than designating a pathname, or a NUL
> character for designating anything other than end of filename, is not
> POSIX compliant and will not work on any operating system I know of,
> including windows.

Windows is not Posix-compliant, so all bets are off.  As a matter of
fact, there _are_ DBCS codepages where the second byte can be '\'.