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Date:Mon May 11 13:38:59 2001 
Subject:Re: filenames, argument list separators 
From: 
Volume-ID:1010511.07 

In article <9dgp2s$5n7$1@ctb-nnrp2.saix.net>,
	cglur@onwe.co.za writes:
 
> Space being a valid char in an identifier, seems absurd.

Why?

Spaces occur in identifiers all over the place. Here are some examples.

    Christopher James Dollin
    Windows 95
    Red Hat Linux
    The Sorceress and the Cygnet
    Thief of Time
    A Song for all Seasons
    Shifting Sands
    For Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night
    Spice manual
    Chatty guide
    Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
    Samual @kins

> My prefered OS (oberon) allows only alpha-numeric and 'period' for fileIDs

Oh, spit. That's ridiculous. No hyphens, underbars, plus signs, etc? I
think that's taking things to extremes I only dream (badly) of. I presume
you're allowed arbitrarily long filenames?

> but files of other systems, with 'invalid' chars can be read,
>    by quoting. eg:  "c:/o236/file-name.htm"

So the file-system hadler accepts names with arbitrary characters, you 
just can't create files with them in? How ... strange.
 
> This is a fundamental design decision, and should not be messed with.

Why? I have a guess, which may or may not be well-founded. Is it some attempt
to make filenames correspond to programming-language identifiers? Because
while I can accept a no-special-characters rule for such identifers
(because of the rich syntactic context they must appear in), I don't
think the reasons translate to filenames.
 
> Is this matter related to pop11's failure to detect the missing separator
> in the local var. declaration, below ?  My understanding is that comma
> (only) is a a valid separator here ?
> 
>     define listify(list) -> result;
>               vars next   tail;

HELP VARS says:

    For the present, commas may be omitted except after an initialisation,
    but it is recommended that they be used.

and I'd assume it's mostly a backward-compatability relic from the days
of POP2.

No, there's no relationship between the one and the other.

-- 
Chris "campaign for real filenames" Dollin
C FAQs at: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/by-newsgroup/comp/comp.lang.c.html