Re: Silly argument for a unix DIRECTORY:

rpw3@xxxxxxxx (Rob Warnock) writes:

Ari Krupnik <ari@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
+---------------
| Barry Margolin <barmar@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
| >> ...in CMUCL: Silly argument for a unix DIRECTORY: "/home/ari/foo"
| >> What makes this a silly argument?
| >
| > Because it should be a list of strings: ("home" "ari" "foo").
|
| Ah! I get it now. Thanks for the clarification. I guess the first
| element in that list should be :absolute ?
+---------------

Given your name and the string you started with, yeah, almost certainly!

And personally I'd prefer

:DIRECTORY (:ABSOLUTE "HOME" "ARI" "FOO") :CASE :COMMON

so that my code would port to other systems that might not have the
same case conventions. In :CASE :COMMON, uppercase means "the native
case of the file system" (so it would be lowercase on Unix) and
lowercase means "the non-native case of the file system". There
aren't a lot of non-lowercase systems left, so perhaps it's just a
useless fight on my part, but so it goes.

If we did it today, we'd probably have flipped the case used for
common case, but ironically that would probably have caused a lot more
confusion, because people wouldn't understand that it was something
different than native case. They would think it meant "this is the
most common case that file systems use". What I like about
all-uppercase even today is that it stands out saying "this is a
representation" as opposed to "this is the actual filename"...

Then again, you can see I don't suffer from the same phobia of uppercase
that some people do. Looking at the above, it didn't even occur to me I
was typing in uppercase for the symbols--I just did it instinctively.
Again, because it stands out nicely against a background of English text
without my having to use fonting.

Ah well.
.

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