Re: locate-file in Emacs

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>
>> But I have one question left: should the `file-directory-p' check be enforced
>> independently from `predicate' ?
>> I.e. can (locate-file f p s 'file-readable-p) return a directory ?
>
> My vote is for NO, for a couple of reasons:
>
>   - it is rare for a program to want to find files and directories alike, 
>     so using file-directory-p is not a nuisance, in practice;
>
>   - different filesystems impose different limitations on what system 
>     calls work on directories (for example, some won't let you `read' a 
>     directory), so the application will have to filter non-files anyway.
>
> Of course, compatibility considerations could render these reasons less 
> important.

Fortunately, compatibility agrees with your reasoning, and so do I.

Note that XEmacs's internal locate_file() is based on what was once
openp().  So the similarities are not completely coincidental.