> Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2016 10:24:56 -0400 > From: "Thompson, David" <dthomps...@worcester.edu> > Cc: Guile User <guile-user@gnu.org>, Chris Marusich <cmmarus...@gmail.com> > > The environment variable path separator is *not* defined depending on > the OS. It is up to the programs that interpret these search paths to > specify what the separator should be. ":" is the most common > separator, but that is just convention. A search path is opaque to > the operating system, where environment variables are just strings > with no inherent meaning.
We are not talking about the OS, we are talking about the programs that set and query environment variables using 'getenv', 'putenv', and other similar APIs, followed by simple string processing. And those are definitely _not_ treating the separator as opaque, something you can easily verify both by looking at the sources of the respective applications, and by simple experiments. And in that sense, the path separator character is always ':' on Posix systems and ';' on MS-Windows. So I think Guile ought to have such a variable; Emacs, for one, does.
