On 2009-Aug-14, at 5:36 am, Richard Hainsworth wrote:
Would it be possible to remove the special purpose of \ from strings within IO constructs?
It's P6, anything's possible! I probably wouldn't change [what look like] ordinary quoted strings, but maybe something with a "qf//"-type construct (or would that be qf\\ ?!). My idea of using a macro was to grab almost anything that wasn't whitespace, and it doesn't have to be parsed like a normal string, so \ could be interpreted as a dir separator.
Of course, / has become so standard, that it even works on Windows (kind of); on the other hand, being able to use either (or both) would be convenient for a lot of people.
On 2009-Aug-14, at 7:18 am, Leon Timmermans wrote:
I don't think that's a good idea. In general, parsing an URI isn't that easy, in particular determining the end is undefined AFAIK. In your example the semicolon should probably be considered part of the URI, even though that's obviously not what you intended.
Well, we can encode a URI any way we like -- I was thinking of anything up to the next whitespace or semicolon, maybe allowing for balanced brackets; and internal semicolons, etc. being %-encoded. I guess the argument would be that using an encoding that looks almost- but-not-quite like other popular ways of representing URIs could be confusing, and people would be tempted to paste in addresses from their browser without re-encoding them the "P6 way".
Maybe it's more practical to permit only URIs with little to no punctuation to be unquoted, and quote anything else? Not that quoting is such a great hardship anyway....
On 2009-Aug-14, at 7:41 am, Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
And in response to David Green and his comment about working with file data vs. metadata, as a systems programmer, I've written a fair number of programs that have worried a fair bit about the metadata in the filesystem; sometimes you want to read data, and sometimes metadata.
Of course; and when I referred to "low-level" and "high-level", there isn't really a distinct dividing line between the two. Is getting (or setting) the modification date on a file low-level because it's "metadata", or high-level because it's a simple, "ordinary" task? I don't particularly care about the classification; I just wanted to make the point that P6 should make it possible to gloss over anything that's over-glossable.
-David
