Andy Wingo <wi...@pobox.com> writes: > On Fri 29 Apr 2011 19:30, Noah Lavine <noah.b.lav...@gmail.com> writes: >> Also, are there any characters that are valid in filenames on some >> systems but invalid on other systems? > > Ah, I see you are under the delusion that paths are composed of > characters :) This is not the case. To the OS, paths are > NUL-terminated byte arrays, with some constraints about their > composition, but which are not necessarily representable as strings.
This is the case on POSIX, but we should keep in mind that on some systems (e.g. Windows NT) filenames are considered character data, or at least so says PEP 383 <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0383/> IMHO, it would be best to avoid embedding into Guile the assumption that filenames, environment variables, command-line arguments, etc, are really bytevectors. > Basically I think the plan should be to add scm_from_locale_path, > scm_from_raw_path, etc to filesys.[ch], and change any > pathname-accepting procedure in Guile to accept path objects, producing > them from strings when given strings, and pass the bytevector > representation to the raw o/s procedures like `open' et al. I like this idea, but we should keep in mind that we face the same problem with things like environment variables, command-line arguments, etc. Ideally, we should try to come up with a coherent story and set of APIs for dealing with all of these data that are string-like, but actually bytevectors on some systems. Mark
