[Gcl-devel] RE: GCL on Windows

[Page, Bill]

On Tuesday, December 14, 2004 8:48 AM Camm Maguire wrote:
> 
> Greetigns!  Does Windows not recognize the ~ expansion in
> MSYS?  If it does, and gcl is not picking it up for some
> reason, I'd like to get the truename to work.  What about
> (truename (si::getenv "HOME"))?
> 

In MSYS ~ is expanded as $HOME = /home/username as you would
expect in a unix shell environment. But being a single user
system by design native Windows does not have any exact
equivalent of /home/username. Axiom for Windows does not
assume that it is run from within the MSYS environment.

The closest thing to /home/username is perhaps

  c:\Documents and Settings\username

on Windows 2000/XP systems but the analogy is not exact and
it is not used the same way by most windows applications.

Under Axiom for Windows we get

(1) -> )lisp (truename (si::getenv "HOME"))

   >> System error:
   Cannot coerce NIL to a PATHNAME.

------

because the environment variable HOME is not defined.

Regards,
Bill Page.