Re: pathname with tilde and wildcard characters

Stas Boukarev <[email protected]> wrote:

> (namestring (parse-native-namestring "~/foo??.lisp"))
> =>
> "~/foo\\?\\?.lisp"
> 
> So it escapes the wildcards but doesn't escape ~. That might actually
> be a bug in sbcl.

IMO it's a bug relative to the apparent intended design.

But can anybody think of a reason why there should be a late-binding
representation of user home directories, as opposed to expanding the
tilde notation in parse-namestring (i.e., what ABCL, Allegro, CCL,
Clisp, ECL, and LispWorks do)?

AFAICT, every program where late-binding of #P"~/" could make a
difference could be written using a combination of merge-pathnames
and/or enough-namestring with user-homedir-pathname (and must be written
that way for a program to work on other implementations).

The only unique use case I can think of is to let you dump a fasl
containing a pathname with (:absolute (:home <user>)) and have that
pathname resolve differently on another Unix host.

But the representation makes for extra cases for users and maintainers
to need, and, more importantly, to forget, to deal with.

Regards,
Richard