John E. Malmberg wrote:
What does it mean? Is it a synonym for cwd?
No. It means "SYS$DISK:[]." which is a file with a null name and a null
extension. A period delimiter between a file and the extension is
always present.
Rather different from cwd. Ok then.
At a guess I'd say it's to take into account that '' means something
on VMS. In the interest of compatibility, it should be ok to make an
exception for an empty string as the first directory in the list.
I think it would be unusual for someone to pass '' to catdir in VMS
specific code especially since currently does nothing at all.
Good.
I was thinking more of code written by VMS natives for VMS. I think
non-natives will be quite happy of any opportunity to throw out VMS
exceptions.
Some sort of flag to tell Perl on VMS it does not need to be backwards
compatible inside of a module or a program?
Nobody would remember to turn it on.
As File::Spec::VMS->catdir('', 'foo', 'bar') and File::Spec::VMS->('foo',
'bar') are currently equivalent, I really can't see anyone bothering with the
former. I'm happy with just calling it a bug. The "leading empty string
indicates absolute path" hasn't always worked right.
--
E: "Would you want to maintain a 5000 line Perl program?"
d: "Why would you write a 5000 line program?"
