Re: DIRECTORY behavior with /= implementations

Holger Schauer <Holger.Schauer@xxxxxx> writes:

On 5294 September 1993, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
That said, if all implementations running on Linux could agree on the
mapping between ext2/ext3 file systems and CL pathnames, it already be
a nice step forward.

Similarly for all implementations running on MS-Windows to map NTFS
and CL.

I think that might be a nice CDR proposal, where "that" translates to
"proposal how file systems and CL pathnames should match on the major
platforms". Now, what constitutes a major platform is probably a
matter of debate.

BTW, I think it would be nice if there would be some obvious link from
cliki and the ALU pages/wiki to CDR, although one might argue that
four final CDR documents hardly is a lot of content.

On the other hand, some implementations may want to present an
homogeneous view (for CL code) across various OS and FS, and this
requirement is at cross with the portability one (even if it eases
intra-'implementation' portability).

Well, that would have to be seen, wouldn't it? Of course, pathnames
are file system specific and some parts might not be possible to hide
beneath some homogeneous view, but I fail to see how that differs from
the situation we have today. But perhaps I'm missing something obvious
here ..


Well, I've not studied pathnames across systems too closely, so I'll
take the example of binary files.

On a big endian platform, one could expect that files :element-type
'(unsigned-byte 32) be 'standardized' in big-endian format, so all CL
implementation on that big endian platform will write such compatible
files.

On the other hand, clisp do write its binary files always in little
endian, even on a big endian machine, so files written by clisp on one
machine can be read by clisp on another without any problem.


Since this intra-implementation cross-platform compatibility seems
important for clisp developers and users, it would be hard to make it
use big-endian encoding on big-endian processors (happily, now that
Apple switched to Intel, there remains no big-endian processor, so to
speak). Perhaps we could just way for world domination of a single
file system, and standardize on that, when it will happen.

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__
.

Relevant Pages

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