[asdf-devel] Logical pathnames....

[Robert Goldman]

On 5/22/11 May 22 -5:36 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:
> Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> writes:
> 
>> FWIW, I am just working on a project that has some CL people and some
>> non-CL people.  The fact that pathnames with underscores (that C
>> programmers, e.g., are fond of) break decoding when they appear in
>> logical pathnames is a real stinker.
>>
>> This alone is almost enough to rule out of court the use of logical
>> pathnames, IMO....
> 
> Logical pathnames are not made to represent physical pathnames.  For
> this, there are physical pathnames.
> 
> However, you can map logical pathnames to physical pathnames, with
> logical pathname translations.
> 
> But obviously, pathnames provided by users won't be logical pathnames:
> logical pathnames are meaningless to users.  Users only know physical
> pathnames.  Logical pathnames are not designed to be used by user, but
> by programmers, to shield programmers from the idiosyncrasies of user
> pathnames.

OK, but how does forbidding the use of underscores shield anyone from
anything except access to files! ;-)

With all due respect, people WANT filenames with underscores in them.
And if I specify a logical host, and provide code that uses that logical
host to access real physical files, then users are going to be confused
when they can open

"foo:bar;baz.lisp"

but

"foo:bar;baz_2.lisp"

will stubbornly refuse to load....

Worse, if I write code that loads files for users, they will just see

(process-my-file "baz_2.lisp")

fail to work....

> 
> 
> But then, ASDF is not used by users, but by programmers.
> Therefore there's no incompatibility between ASDF and logical pathnames.
> 
> 

Right.  As Faré points out, he has made every effort to make ASDF work
with logical pathnames.  But that is different from the claim some seem
to be making, that logical pathnames are /sufficient/ for ASDF.  I am
with Faré in feeling that this is not so....

Best,
r