CHAPTER 15Practical: A PortablePathname Library
As I discussed in the previous chapter, Common Lisp provides an abstraction, the pathname, that's supposed to insulate you from the details of how different operating systems and file systems name files. Pathnames provide a useful API for manipulating names as names, but when it comes to the functions that actually interact with the file system, things get a bit hairy.
The root of the problem, as I mentioned, is that the pathname abstraction was designed to represent filenames on a much wider variety of file systems than are commonly used now. Unfortunately, by making pathnames abstract enough to account for a wide variety of file systems, Common Lisp's designers left implementers with a fair number ...
Get Practical Common Lisp now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
