[Openmcl-devel] Possible problem with host-namestring

[Gary King]

Thanks Gary,

I understand that this is implementation dependent (and that "wrong" 
was the _wrong_ word to use <smile>). Your reasons make sense and I'll 
create a work around.

Thanks again.

On Jan 4, 2004, at 8:00 PM, Gary Byers wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Gary King wrote:
>
>> I think that the problem indicated below is legitimate. Is there a
>> reason for OpenMCL's differing behavior (that I will work around in my
>> own code) or is OpenMCL in the "wrong".
>
> One reason is "whim": the namestring returned by HOST-NAMESTRING is
> inherently implementation-dependent, and there are lots of differences
> between the pathname implementations of MCL and OpenMCL.
>
> One reason I can see for OpenMCL's HOST-NAMESTRING tacking a
> colon onto the name of a defined logical host is to slightly simplify
> the implementation of NAMESTRING.  Having HOST-NAMESTRING behave the
> way that it does is that the behavior of:
>
> ? (pathname-host (host-namestring "HOME:"))
>
> is arguably more consistent and intuitive, though using terms like
> "consistent and intuitive" when discussing pathnames is asking for
> trouble.
>
> Those may or may not seem like compelling reasons for differing from
> MCL's behavior, but it's certainly not wrong for implementations to do
> implementation-dependent things in implementation-dependent ways.
>
> It's sometimes hard to avoid writing code that depends on 
> implementation
> arcana (this is perhaps especially true when pathnames are involved), 
> but
> if it's possible to do so in your case it's probably desirable.
>
>> Thanks in advance.
>
>
-- 
Gary Warren King, Lab Manager
EKSL East, University of Massachusetts * 413 577 0176

When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas.
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