Re: Module name mangling

[Dirk Herrmann]

On 30 Jan 2001, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> > because there are so many other problems that we have not yet
> > dealt with:  Unix allows an arbitrary number of '.' characters in a
> > filename, while for other well known systems there may be only one '.',
> > which only may be followed by a limited number of characters.  This can
> > not simply be but into an encoding as with the suggested scheme, because
> > we would like the '.scm' postix to stay unencoded :-)
> 
> Why?  We can encode "." as "%dot%" and then tack on the ".scm" suffix
> with no problem.

Certainly there is an algorithm for that.  And a simple one.  However, it
is a _different_ algorithm than the simple one that I had posted.  This
example was only given to demonstrate that with all those different
operating systems out there, there is "always one more problem" with some
OS that you did not think about before, but that this is not relevant
anyway because guile won't get ported to that OS.  Thus, it was a bad
choice by me to take an example from a windows system, because it is a
real problem for us.  But, instead, think of older MS-DOS systems, with
their 8.3 filename restriction.  We could certainly try to find an
encoding for module names that maps longer names to that length.  But:  
it isn't worth to think about it _now_, probably _never_, because as long
as guile is not to be ported to such a system we don't have to care at all
to provide the "perfect-fitting-all-OS-enconding".

> > Thus, a 'perfect' module-name>encoded-filename function would be
> > much more complex than the current solution.  However, if we were
> > trying to take all this into account, we would spend a lot of time
> > for solving a problem of very limited relevance.
> 
> Maybe, but we should still try to find a more exhaustive list of
> characters to encode anyway.  That should be easy enough.  I don't
> think we can afford to change the encoding frequently.

OK.  Another point:  What about languages with different character
encodings?  If guile will be i18n'ed, such characters may appear in
symbols, and thus also in module names...

Best regards,
Dirk Herrmann