RE: [Gcl-devel] Re: delayed pathname.d patch

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Bill.

Glad to hear from you again!

| In case you might sometimes get the feeling that no one
| else is watching your continuing dialogue with Camm towards
| the next GCL release,  I thought I would just say that I
| for one, find the detailed online "debugging by email"
| quite interesting (but challenging) reading. However I am
| gradually learning more about GCL. Thanks.

No worries.  In terms of my understanding of the problems GCL presently
faces on Windows I liken my debugging approach to Earnest Rutherford's
famous experiment in which he randomly firing electron at thin gold foil to
discover how much space existed between the nuclei and the electrons!

| When you mentioned that you are seeing paths without the
| C: prefix in Windows, it reminded me that this was one of
| the things I struggled with while trying to get Axiom
| running on Windows. I came to the conclusion that there
| are several places - in Axiom at least - where file names
| are passed as symbols instead of strings. This seems to
| mean that sometimes the C: is misinterpreted as something
| like a (package?) name and not part of the file name or
| path. I don't know if this is the what is happening in
| this particular case, but it seems to be a general issue
| in windows that the C: syntax of file names precludes the
| use of symbols. Does this make sense?

In principal it does and I have at times been suspicious of the same thing,
but on this occasion my diagnosis (above) was fired from the hip as I ran
for the door and missed the target by miles.

Cheers

Mike Thomas