> Is it? You cannot have slashes in filenames, no matter what (that's a
> decision Plan B should lift by representing, as I believe Rob Pike
> recommended, paths as arrays of strings rather than slash delimited
> strings).
this is not a serious limitation. your suggestion to use an array of char*
would be equivalent to saying use \0 as the path delimiter. now paths are
not compatable with other strings used by the c library. as i understand
your suggestion, you would encode /env/fn#upas/fs as
\0env\0fn#upas\0fs\0\0
(there's a bug as / and '' would both be encoded as \0\0. i think this is
a fundamental problem because \0 is overloaded as the path seperator
and the end-of-string marker.)
when passed in to a program as argv[n]. such an encoding would
be required to preserve compatablity between other strings and
paths.
how would you expect to type a path at the shell prompt?
even if you turn this into an array of char* inside a program,
strings would now not be type-compatable with paths.
do you have a reference for rob suggesting this?
- erik
