Re: load versus Macintosh

[freeman@MasPar.COM (Jay R. Freeman)]

Clinger is right about the Mac same-volume-name disambiguation problem.
(Personally I think of this one as more of a bug in the Mac file system
than one in any implementation that runs thereon.  :-)  )  With the
increasing popularity of easily-removable discs -- even on more
traditional workstations -- and of various kinds of GUIs, implementations
of languages and so forth that implicitly assume permanently-mounted
volumes and keyboard / tty interfaces, are going to face an increasing
class of places where extensions are very desirable.  The problem is
clearly meta to Scheme itself.  Having a procedure pop up a standard
file dialog box when an expected file name is absent was an obvious way
to deal with one such problem on the Macintosh, and I tried to do so
consistently in Pixie Scheme; and it was also easy to bind keyboard
commands to invoke dialog-box versions of "load", etc.

It is interesting that the same-volume-name problem is not absent in
older operating systems.  Unix has it, for example, only it is buried
under the use of "mount" and "umount"; and some of the earliest minis had
removable hard-disc packs.

Scheme seems widely used as a teaching language likely often under
the Mac OS, or Windows, or what-have-you.  Perhaps the Scheme standards
groups should think about some kind of standardization of how Scheme
works in a personal-computer / GUI environment.

                                           -- Jay Freeman