Using filenames which contain wildcard characters

Marco Antoniotti wrote:
>According to the CLHS (not directly), an implementation should provide  
>an implementation dependent way of quoting the implementation dependent  
>wild characters in the pathname component and/or namestring.  Here is  
>the relevant bit.

>  19.2.2.1.1 Special Characters in Pathname Components
>Strings in pathname component values never contain special characters  
>that represent separation between pathname fields, such as slash in  
>Unix filenames.

I do not think that this passage is relevant. It's about file system special 
characters, while the matter at hand is about a CLISP-specific and internal 
extension about "*" and "?", but acknowledged in CLHS as "implementation 
dependent special wildcard characters" (cf. ?19.2.2.3)

What I believe is as follows:
This topic (annoying behaviour of CLISP) is bound to disappear. It's an ancient 
CLISP bastion which is going to fall the more users complain about it, like two 
others did fall in the past, due to user complaints:
 - ".emacs" to be parsed as either :name ".emacs" or :name nil/"" :type "emacs"
   cf. custom:*parse-namestring-dot-file*
 - merge-pathname (:relative "foo") (:relative "bar")
   either fill :directory or append
   cf. custom:*merge-pathnames-ansi*

I believe some people do use CLISP for scripting. I'm quite surprised that they 
haven't complained yet (often enough) about CLISP's inability to access any 
regular file that may be found in a file system.

BTW, CLISP's impnotes still mentions the old ".dot-file" behaviour in various 
parts of section "Pathname components", and *parse-namestring-dot-file* doesn't 
seem mentioned.

So maybe OPEN, TRUENAME etc. should just check against presence of :wild or 
:wild-inferiors, not against #\* or #\?, while DIR and DIRECTORY could maintain 
their portable-across-clisp pattern matching behaviour.

But then, you must also suggest conforming behaviour for wild-pathname-p and 
?19.2.2.3
http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/Body/sec_19-2-2-3.html

Please suggest a custom:*nice-name* and convince Sam :-)


BTW, why doesn't this work:
[75]> (make-pathname :directory '(:absolute :wild) :name "foo")
*** - MAKE-PATHNAME: illegal :DIRECTORY argument (:ABSOLUTE :WILD)
-- I'd expect #p"*/foo"
while this is accepted (which I consider equivalent):
(make-pathname :directory '(:absolute "*") :name "foo")
as well as(!):
(make-pathname :directory '(:absolute :wild-inferiors) :name "foo")
-> #p"**/foo"

Regards,
        Jorg Hohle.


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