Re: Issue: PATHNAME-COMPONENT-CASE (Version 1)

[Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>]

> Date: Tue, 19 Jul 88 11:04 EDT
> From: Kent M Pitman <KMP@arpa.scrc-stony-brook>

> A namestring is a concrete representation of a filename. Since
> namestrings are not portable, a namestring is rarely part of a program
> and is more commonly the result of user typein or of an operation such
> as NAMESTRING which coerces a pathname to its native string
> representation.

I guess I don't understand this point, because I don't see that pathnames
are all that portable.  Aren't the files usually in a different place on
different machines, and so musn't the pathname be different for different
machines?  A pathname might work if I'm creating a file and am willing to
have it go to some default place (the current directory, say), but
otherwise I may have to know there's a place called "/tmp" or something
of that sort.

Moreover, it turns out that many programs do contain namestrings.  The
defsys in PCL is one example.  They are immediately converted to pathnames,
but nonetheless start out as namestrings.

-- Jeff