On 6/17/10 7:38 PM, Alessio Stalla wrote: […]
Fact 3: pathnames already can (and sometimes do) print themselves as a property list enumerating the components, for example #P(:name "foo" :directory (:absolute "bar" "baz")) - which is not ANSI compatible, by the way.
Proposed solution: let's invent an ABCL-specific way to print arbitrary pathnames. I proposed #P"abcl:(make-pathname ...)" which is ANSI-compatible and similar enough to what the current code in Pathname.writeToString can produce. Let's use that to print pathnames[1]. Reading them back is as simple as (eval (read-from-string ...)), and no other code needs to be modified.
I can't easily find a reference to figure out what is non-ANSI about our current non-printable namestring representation. Could you provide a pointer and/or a summary to what constraints we are operating under here? Or maybe it has to do more with reader macros than namestrings?