From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!skynet.be!skynet.be!ossa.telenet-ops.be!nmaster.kpnqwest.net!nreader3.kpnqwest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Known inconsistencies or bugs in CLHS? References: <873cy1nnni.fsf@ortler.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de> <3228152797754759@naggum.net> Mail-Copies-To: never From: Erik Naggum Message-ID: <3228204118313722@naggum.net> Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 32 User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 11:21:58 GMT X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@KPNQwest.no X-Trace: nreader3.kpnqwest.net 1019215318 193.71.199.50 (Fri, 19 Apr 2002 13:21:58 MET DST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 13:21:58 MET DST Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:32008 * Christophe Rhodes | 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