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Practical Common Lisp
book

Practical Common Lisp

by Peter Seibel
April 2005
Beginner to intermediate
528 pages
16h 20m
English
Apress
Content preview from Practical Common Lisp

CHAPTER 15Practical: A PortablePathname Library

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Common Lisp provides an abstraction, the pathname, that's supposed to insulate you from the details of how different operating systems and file systems name files. Pathnames provide a useful API for manipulating names as names, but when it comes to the functions that actually interact with the file system, things get a bit hairy.

The root of the problem, as I mentioned, is that the pathname abstraction was designed to represent filenames on a much wider variety of file systems than are commonly used now. Unfortunately, by making pathnames abstract enough to account for a wide variety of file systems, Common Lisp's designers left implementers with a fair number ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781590592397Purchase book