[MLton] Windows ports and paths

[Wesley W. Terpstra]

On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 02:07:41PM +0200, Andreas Rossberg wrote:
> Still I found the treatment of volumes to be somewhat underspecified.

Yeah...

> For instance, what should #arcs(fromString "A:") deliver? (I went for
> [""], in analogy to "/").

That was a mistake I think.
"A:" = "A:.", that's what MLton does now, so arcs=[] and isAbs=false.

I also think this is what the standard intended.
If you allow "\" to be absolute, then it stands to reason "" is "." and by
analogy "E:\" is absolute and "E:" is "E:."

You can confirm that Windows agrees with this as well, because "dir C:"
shows the current volume directory, not the root.

>   - mkRelative should bring its path argument into canonical form as well,
>     otherwise case inconsistencies are introduced

That's a good point; I didn't think of that.

Stephan, could you patch that?
-      case (fromString p1, fromString (mkCanonical p2)) of
+      case (fromString (mkCanonical p1), fromString (mkCanonical p2)) of


>   - concat's samle implementation suggests that volumes must be equal even
>     with respect to case, which is inadequate for case insensitive systems

MLton also ignores the volume case in comparison; I agree with you.
I made that change without even realizing I had done it. :-)

>     Windows (also affects mkAbsolute)
also mkRelative.

Anyways, MLton is consistent on these points.

> Without refining these points, the functions are practically useless on
> Windows (e.g. not even mkRelative("\A\B", "\A") will work). Anecdotical
> evidence is that we got all kinds of unexpected Path exceptions in the Alice
> system at first.

MLton will agree with you on all points but "A:" being root.

-- 
Wesley W. Terpstra <wesley@terpstra.ca>