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. /// -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief. Post with compassion: http://home.chello.no/~xyzzy/kitten.jpg