Re: Behaviour of is-absolute?

[Carl Sorensen]

On 1/24/16 3:35 PM, "address@hidden on
behalf of Urs Liska" <address@hidden on
behalf of address@hidden> wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>now that is-absolute? is not broken anymore (see #4746 and #4747) I'd
>like to raise the question of its *behaviour* - which seems somewhat
>inconsistent to me.
>
>Currently this function behaves differently on Windows and elsewhere,
>and I think this shouldn't be the case.
>
>is-absolute? expects a string representing a file path.
>It returns true if either
>
>it starts with a slash
>or
>if on Windows it starts with a drive letter.
>
>So
>
>(is-absolute? "/some/path")
>always returns #t
>
>but
>(is-absolute? "C:\some\path")
>or
>(is-absolute? "C:/some/path")
>
>returns #t on Windows but #f on Unix.

It seems to me that "\some\path" is a "sort-of" absolute windows path.  It
is an absolute path on the current drive.  It's certainly not a relative
path in the normal sense, meaning that we need to add on the current
directory if we want to get to an absolute path.

Windows has the concept of a drive spec, (C:), unlike linux, which just
has mount points.

So I'm not sure what the best way to handle it.

I guess I'm not much help.

Carl