Re: parse-namestring and logical pathnames

In article
<7c397d97-563b-44b4-9fab-4b85e56367a0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sep 28, 4:37 pm, Richard M Kreuter <kreu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Madhu <enom...@xxxxxxxx> writes:
Allegro is the only implementation that does NOT frob the case of
the specified pathname in ANY WAY.  I find that useful behaviour.
The fact that other implementations frob the name during translation
is the problem[1].
<snip>
[1] imo because they misweigh the imporatance of what the says about
uppercase in the implementation choices open to them.

I disagree.  The intent of the lettercase stuff in the pathnames
specification is to let you say

  (make-pathname :name "FOO" :type "LISP" :case :common)

on any Lisp and with any pathname host and get back a pathname that
maps to a filename using the standard file naming conventions of
whatever file system the file happens to be on (i.e., "FOO.LISP" on
TOPS-20, "foo.lisp" on Unix).  Failing to map uppercase in LPNs or
common case in MAKE-PATHNAME to lowercase on Unix pointlessly
reinvents the portability problems that common case and LPNs were
intended to solve.

Mentioning TOPS-20 in *any* discussion involving pathanames is beneath
contempt. :)

What's wrong with TOPS-20? I see a boom in TOPS-20 systems
on the Internet. For example: http://www.panda.com/tops-20/

;-) <<<<-----------------<<<<


Besides, lowercasing in Unix is wrong as the file system is case-
sensitive.

I thought the case-sensitivity depends on the file
system (and some other magic). If you mount a case-insensitive
file system on a Unix box it does not necessarily get suddenly
case-sensitive. For example Mac OS X 10.5 is certified UNIX and has both
case-sensitive and case-insensitive file systems. If
I export one of those via NFS and someone mounts it
on her/his Solaris box it does not magically case-sensitive
or does it? Mount a PC disk on a Unix machine. Is the
file system suddenly case-sensitive? I doubt that. Mount
a SMB server on a Unix box? Case-sensitive? Probably not.


Cheers
--
Marco

--
http://lispm.dyndns.org/
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: parse-namestring and logical pathnames
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