Subject: Re: Known inconsistencies or bugs in CLHS?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2002 21:06:38 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3228152797754759@naggum.net>

* Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@cs.nyu.edu>
| I think this is worst than that.  Essentially the whole notion of
| `host' is essentially undefined in ANSI.  It does not even appear in
| the Glossary.  And the definition of PATHNAME-HOST is not helpful.

  Huh?  The entry for pathname-host has glossary links to "valid pathname
  host".  There are also glossary entries on logical host and logical host
  designator.  The function host-namestring returns the host name, clearly
  a string.

| So.  The only reasonable course of action here is to get the implementors
| to agree on what they want in the HOST component.

  A string should always suffice.

| Xanalys and Franz people, what do *you* think?  (Given that NIL is not
| necessarily a good thing to have in there).

  Franz Inc does not appear to believe in pathnames and so give them a very
  low priority.  It should not be possible to use nil as an _actual_ host,
  but that is precisely what their pathname implementation does; even
  host-namestring returns nil!  It does accept the empty string as the host
  argument to parse-namestring, though.  CMUCL's host-namestring returns
  "Unix", yet it does not understand when the same value is attempted to be
  used as a valid pathname host, and the empty string signals an error.
  CLISP appears to accept the empty string as the system physical host and
  return it as the host-namestring, and so, apparently, does LispWorks.  I
  found this variation among implementations quite fascinating.
  
///
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