Re: lynx-dev dev.23: extended INCLUDE syntax broken for DOSPATH

[Leonid Pauzner]

25-Apr-99 06:54 Klaus Weide wrote:

> Why not use just ' ' space?   Apart from disallowing filenames with
> spaces, it looks non-intuitive, as if several files were included.

> Actually, in *this* case (not generally), I'm in favor of adding some
> syntactic sugar.  As in

>   include:~/.lynx/rc for COLOR KEYMAP VIEWER SUFFIX

I read all this thread and think Klaus' idea with space
and a reserved word "for" looks best.
There is no problem to explain this syntax in lynx.cfg
so nobody will be confused, and literal " for " in filenames
seems a very rare case (so we get an extra recovery).

(As for my original DOS problem I set HOME variable
and include:~/lynx.cfg   without full path so it was expanded
by read_cfg() so I work around this particular case).


> with 'for' as a reserved special word.  That makes it quite obvious
> what the extended syntax means.  To allow (unambiguouly) filenames
> with spaces, some sort of quoting (with '"'?) should also be recognized
> (but that's ugly because in quoted strings I'd expect '\' to act like
> an escape, which intereferes with usage as path separator on Windows
> where filenames with spaces are most likely to occur).

>>  Another idea - seems that ':' is unusual character in unix filenames - so we
>> can support this feature on unix as it is (without changing extra logic like
>> quoting, escaping, etc - just ifdef'ing), and disable it on DOS,VMS, MacOS - 
>> I
>> don't think there are a lot of ISP that run these OSes.

> Why introduce a new feature, potentially useful beyond the situation
> you envision ('ISP'), and then artificially restrict it (not for
> functional reasons)?

>>  Or we can provide this feature on these OSes, but delimiter will be 
>> different
>> from ':' for them - may be '*' on these OSes and still ':' on unix?

> There's already too many "if your OS is x, then do this, but if your OS is y
> then do that" things to confuse people, many of them undocumented.  Please
> don't add more unless necessary.

>     Klaus