Issue: PATHNAME-WILD (Version 2)

[Kent M Pitman <KMP@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM>]

    Date: Thu, 6 Oct 88 22:07 EDT
    From: Richard Mlynarik <MLY@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>

	  The CL pathname model does not provide a way to represent such wildcards,
	  which means, for example, that (MAKE-PATHNAME :NAME "F*O") cannot be
	  recognized by portable code as containing a wildcard.

    This is not even `portable' code for creating a wildcarded pathname.
    How do you distinguish between pathname named "f*o" and a wildcarded
    pathname which starts with an #\f and ends with an #\o??  (BTW, the
    Symbolics pathname system ducks the entire issue.)

    The pathname specification is so crippled that adding dinky frobs like
    PATHNAME-WILD-P isn't going to make any difference to `portability' --
    about all it will add is another page to the CL manual.

The purpose of this isn't to say what's wild, it's to give portable code
a way to guard against wildcards.

Sample portable program that it is not possible to write correctly now
but would be after this proposal:

 (DEFUN SHOW-FILE (FILE) ;Allows wildcards
   (DOLIST (FILE (IF (PATHNAME-WILD-P FILE)
		     (DIRECTORY FILE)
		     (LIST FILE)))
     (WITH-OPEN-FILE (STREAM FILE)
       (DO ((LINE (READ-LINE STREAM NIL NIL) (READ-LINE STREAM NIL NIL)))
	   ((NOT LINE))
	 (FORMAT T "~&~A~%" LINE)))))