#

## Issue PATHNAME-SYMBOL Writeup

    Issue:		PATHNAME-SYMBOL

    References:   	PATHNAME (p.413),
                    Derived references: PARSE-NAMESTRING (p.414),
                    MERGE-PATHNAMES (p.415), PATHNAME-HOST etc. (p.417),
                    NAMESTRING etc. (p.417), LOAD (p. 426), REQUIRE
                    Cleanup issue PATHNAME-STREAM
                    Common LispCraft, Wilensky 1986, p 51

    Edit History:  Version 1 by Moon 11-May-87
                   Version 2 by Masinter 29-May-87
                   Version 3 by Masinter 23-Oct-87
                   Version 4 by Masinter 23-Nov-87
                   Version 5 by Masinter  5-Feb-88, fix minor typo

    Category:     	CHANGE

    Problem Description:

    Some Common Lisp functions are specified to accept a symbol where a pathname is
    expected.  Some others (OPEN, WITH-OPEN-FILE, DELETE-FILE, and RENAME-FILE) are
    not specified to accept a symbol.

    Proposal PATHNAME-SYMBOL:NO

    Never allow symbols where pathnames are expected. More specifically, PATHNAME,
    TRUENAME, PARSE-NAMESTRING, MERGE-PATHNAMES, PATHNAME-HOST, PATHNAME-DEVICE,
    PATHNAME-DIRECTORY, PATHNAME-NAME, PATHNAME-TYPE, PATHNAME-VERSION, NAMESTRING,
    FILE-NAMESTRING, DIRECTORY-NAMESTRING, HOST-NAMESTRING, ENOUGH-NAMESTRING,
    REQUIRE are changed by this proposal to not allow symbols for their pathname
    argument.

    Reiterate that OPEN, WITH-OPEN-FILE, LOAD, COMPILE-FILE, RENAME-FILE,
    DELETE-FILE, FILE-WRITE-DATE, FILE-AUTHOR do not allow symbols for their file or
    filename argument, and that DIRECTORY does not allow a symbol for its pathname
    argument. This is implied by the respective descriptions of those functions in
    CLtL, but not explicitly stated.

    Rationale:

    Allowing symbols for pathnames was based on an obsolete practice in MacLisp
    (which did not have strings) and causes much error-prone behavior.

    Current Practice:

    Varies.  Some implementations allow symbols here, some don't.  Symbolics doesn't
    allow symbols except in PARSE-NAMESTRING and MERGE-PATHNAMES, and allowing them
    there is probably a bug in the implementation.

    Cost to implementors:

    It's easy to change implementations to stop accepting symbols.  Since this
    appears to be an "is an error" rather than "signals an error" situation, no
    implementation change is actually necessary.

    Cost to users:

    Some users might be using symbols as pathnames, in implementations where that
    works, and they would have to switch to using strings. For example, some users
    are used to typing interactively (LOAD 'FOO) to mean (LOAD "FOO"). This is not
    explicitly allowed in CLtL, so such behavior has not been portable. However,
    such use is probably widespread among users of implementations that allow it
    (e.g., Common LISPCraft gives this form in an example.)

    Benefits:

    Pathname functions will be more consistent.  In implementations that check the
    type of this argument, program error checking will be improved. In dealing with
    case-sensitive file systems, users won't do (load 'foo) and wonder why file
    "FOO" (rather than "foo") is not found.

    One example of the type of bug caused by this occurs when NIL is erroneously
    substituted for a pathname, perhaps because GETHASH or ASSOC didn't find a table
    entry that was expected to exist and returned -false-.  In systems that accept
    symbols as pathnames, this causes a reference to a file named "NIL" on some
    perhaps unexpected directory.

    Aesthetics:

    Improved by the change.

    Discussion:

    Some users have reported that they thought MERGE-PATHNAMES was in error because
    it accepted symbols.

    We believe that this feature was accidentally introduced as a historical
    artifact and that it has limited utility. It is likely that the feature of
    accepting a symbol was copied by Common Lisp from Zetalisp, which in turn copied
    it from Maclisp.  The reason Maclisp allowed a symbol here was that it did not
    have strings at all.  While the feature was removed from Zetalisp before Common
    Lisp was defined due to the poor state of Zetalisp documentation at the time the
    change was overlooked by the designers of Common Lisp.

    If a symbol can be coerced into a string, and a string can be coerced into a
    pathname, why can't a symbol be coerced into a pathname? An explicit decision
    was made early in the design of CL not to make all coercions transitive.  For
    example, symbols coerce to strings (for string functions), and strings are
    sequences (and so can be mixed with other sequence types), but symbols are not
    sequences.

    There is some sentiment for extending COERCE to allow explicit coersion of
    STRINGs to PATHNAMEs, as a separate cleanup item.

    A careful reading of CLtL indicates that it is possible for an implementation to
    allow a symbol to be a STREAM (there is no requirement that STREAM and SYMBOL be
    disjoint.) While there is some sentiment for making this requirement in a
    separate cleanup issue, it would otherwise prevent both symbol->pathname and
    stream->pathname to have consistent meaning.

Copyright 1996-2001, Xanalys Inc. All rights reserved.