Re: Issue: PATHNAME-SYNTAX-ERROR-TIME (Version 1)

[sandra%cdr@cs.utah.edu (Sandra J Loosemore)]

Of the options presented for this issue, I prefer
PATHNAME-SYNTAX-ERROR-TIME:PATHNAME-CREATION.  The NAMESTRING-COERCION
option seems like it is really the wrong time, and I would rather not
leave it EXPLICITLY-VAGUE.

However, I would really like to see something completely different --
namely adding a keyword argument to TRUENAME to allow it to be used
for explicit syntax checking of filenames without signalling an error
if the file doesn't exist.  Functions such as OPEN and the ones in
sections 23.3, 23.4, and 23.5 that actually pass pathnames to the host
file system would be required to (implictly or explicitly) perform the
same checking. 

This would also solve a problem I brought up some time ago, that I was
having with Lucid Lisp under VMS.  I had defined a logical name like
LISP$LIBRARY that expanded into something that included a directory
specifier in its expansion, like disk$login:[loosemore.lisp.library].
However, I was getting things like

    (namestring (merge-pathnames 
                    (pathname "[loosemore]foo.bar")
	            (pathname "lisp$library:")))

=>  "lisp$library:[loosemore]foo.bar"

which the file system naturally barfed on when I tried to open the
file.  The problem was that Lucid's PATHNAME function was treating the
logical name like a device specification instead of expanding it.
TRUENAME would have expanded the logical name for me, but since
LISP$LIBRARY was not a complete pathname for an existing file, it
would also have signalled an error.

-Sandra
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