Subject: Re: Known inconsistencies or bugs in CLHS? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 11:21:58 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3228204118313722@naggum.net> * Christophe Rhodes <csr21@cam.ac.uk> | Well, that's not what the CLHS says -- in the entry for host-namestring, | it says | | namestring---a string or nil. Thanks, I managed to overlook that, since pathname-host is not allowed to return nil -- ah, no, wait. A valid physical pathname host may be a list of strings, so the empty list is the degenerate case. How annoying. I tend to think of "list of strings" as a non-empty list unless explicitly allowed to be empty with "possibly empty list of strings" or something. | I think that it's /possible/ to make a nil return value consistent with | the rest of the system, though it makes parse-namestring less useful for | physical pathnames; I concede that it's ugly, but I'm not convinced that | there's a completely clean solution to putting CL pathnames on a Unix | system... at least, not without sacrificing the obvious representation | for physical namestrings. I think the empty string for host does a good job of ensuring physical pathname parsing. The empty string is not a good logical hostname, since it would mean pathnames would come out with a leading colon. From what I recall of Kent's description of the Genera way, a leading colon would force physical parsing, indicating that an empty host-namestring has some precedence with this meaning. /// -- 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