From ... From: Erik Naggum Subject: Re: argc (omitted argv[0] in count, corrected) Date: 2000/06/22 Message-ID: <3170681795858375@naggum.no>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 637698371 References: mail-copies-to: never Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 961693843 11692 195.0.192.66 (22 Jun 2000 17:10:43 GMT) Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 8800 8879; fax: +47 8800 8601; http://www.naggum.no User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.6 Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 22 Jun 2000 17:10:43 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp * Joe Marshall | That would likely be an incorrect `solution'. Quite the reverse of what we want, actually. It's a design flaw that arguments to programs aren't typed and that quoting, etc, is stripped by the time you get it in the program. The effort required of a shell script to ensure that random arguments to random programs are not misinterpreted as options is distinctily non-trivial. | If you did this unconditionally, then it would be impossible for the | calling process to pass in an argument that contains that particular | field separator. This occurs way too often in Windows, where people | like to put spaces in filenames, but is not unknown to happen in | other OS's. The user tendency to restrict the names of files to whatever is convenient to type in the shell is a symptom of the design flaw. Files should be named whatever the user thinks is descriptive. We have thoroughly abandoned the six- or eight-character filename. #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.