[armedbear-devel] :case :common

[Mark Evenson]

On 11/7/10 5:02 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
>
> CLHS says:
>
>      19.2.2.1.2.2 Common Case in Pathname Components
>
>      For the functions in Figure 19-2, a value of :common for the :case
>      argument that these functions should receive and yield strings in
>      component values according to the following conventions:
>
>      * All uppercase means to use a file system's customary case.
>      * All lowercase means to use the opposite of the customary case.
>      * Mixed case represents itself.
>
>      Note that these conventions have been chosen in such a way that
>      translation from :local to :common and back to :local is
>      information-preserving.

What an odd corner of the CLHS, littered with the bones of extinct 
filesystems! This behavior that seems like it would produce 
unpleasantries much more than it would help anyone, violating the 
principle of least surprise.  But we claim that ABCL will be ANSI first 
and foremost, so I guess we have to pay attention here…

I suppose there is no definition of "customary case", huh?  Pascal 
suggests a notion of filesystem statistics ("99.999% of files are 
lowercase") but for a developer dealing with lots of Java files this 
isn't very releavant.

Lacking a more precise definition, I would then advocate that we declare 
lowercase to be the customary case across UNIX, OSX, and Windows for 
ABCL, patching our behavior accordingly.  I thought briefly about 
advocating Windows to have "uppercase" as its customary case, but that 
is only really true in a DOS world which "modern" Windows systems really 
aren't any more.

And although we theoretically run on JVMs on say VMS, if we run into 
such needs, we might devote a user-accessible special variable to 
control the implementation.

Pending further comments, I'll open a ticket.

-- 
"A screaming comes across the sky.  It has happened before, but there
is nothing to compare to it now."