2009/8/31 erik quanstrom <quans...@coraid.com>: >> 2009/8/31 Bakul Shah <bakul+pl...@bitblocks.com>: >> > But this is nasty! >> > % cat ndb/dom/'' # same as ndbquery dom '' >> >> No, the nasty part is really that the file should be called `.' and >> the filesystem reserves dot as the reference to the current directory. >> You could probably call the file `dot' or `root' (cat ndb/dom/dot or >> cat ndb/dom/root) as something that shouldn't ever conflict with >> anything else -- but the root of DNS is not an empty string. > > aren't you being a little bit pedantic? quoting is a fact > of life. we don't say that it's evil to need to quote or > transform things in rc or smtp to deal with local requirements. > why would it be evil to quote '.'? and why would be calling > '.' 'root' or 'dot' rather than '' be any less evil?
It's (in my opinion) slightly less evil because if(!strlen(name)) seems like a pretty poor way to determine that you're looking at the root zone. It's also more intuitive and easier to document that you're looking at the root than saying `to find root, look for a file named as an empty string'. So: less evil because it makes code more intuitive and it makes documentation easier. Also, I think I should state that I really don't care about implementation as long as it's documented, and that the root is not an empty string. I don't particularly care about quoting at all, and I don't consider that any reason for one method to be more obtuse than another. --dho > - erik > >
