--- Waldek Hebisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Relative $AXIOM have to change when you change directory.
Um. I'm not quite following you here Waldek - isn't that the whole point of relative linking? We set $AXIOM once to define where the toplevel Axiom directory is located, and then everything else changes automatically? > This means that some variable settings have to be repeated. Passing > of filenames to programs working in different directory become > harder. Can you give an example? I'm missing something, I think - what is the difference between having $AXIOM/lib/lib1.spad vs. /usr/local/axiom/mnt/linux/lib/lib1.spad? If I am in $AXIOM/lib and I tell the program to output to $AXIOM/bin, or I want a file in ../input/ or $AXIOM/input, (or for that matter $AXIOM/$INPUT if you want to generalize) those should Just Work. Perhaps lisp has some limitations here? > Also relative paths are likely to hardwire relative > positions of directories, making change harder. Now I'm really confused. How do absolute pathnames not hardwire things as much as relative pathnames? > Recently I noticed that in Lisp relative paths behave in funny way > (it looks that Axiom is frequently calling truename to make > paths absolute and avoid problem). I confess I have not fully understood Lisp's handling of paths as yet, so perhaps there are some issues I am not aware of. > So there are costs (IMHO substantial) to relative paths. > > Later: > > Oh, yeah, one more thing: mingw uses windows native tools, in > > particular options start with forward slash. I don't remember the > > exact details, but at some point some of the absolute paths (using > > Unix-style notation) started being interpreted as options; it isn't > funny. > > Explicit drive letter should cure this problem. Shouldn't Axiom not care at all what drive or directory it is in? I would think the only thing most of the system should need to know is where other parts of the system are relative to the toplevel Axiom directory - where that toplevel directory is located shouldn't make much difference. I am sure I'm missing something important - is there an example where the relative merits of the two approaches can be clearly seen? Cheers, CY ____________________________________________________________________________________ TV dinner still cooling? Check out "Tonight's Picks" on Yahoo! TV. http://tv.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
