[Sbcl-devel] (LOAD "/etc")

[William H. N. <wil...@ai...>]

Should LOAD of a directory be treated as an error?

On the one hand, Unix thinks that reading from directories makes
sense. (For this reason rahul on irc convinced me that (OPEN "/etc")
shouldn't be an error.) So the most obvious interpretation of LOAD on
a directory is to OPEN the file, slurp in the contents, and welcome
the chaos that results when the local Unix performs its interpretation
of a directory as a stream of bytes.

On the other hand, it's pretty thoroughly useless, and thus in
practice certainly a user error, to LOAD a directory. And the ANSI
spec seems to give LOAD a certain amount of slack:
  The manner in which a source file is distinguished from a compiled
  file is implementation-dependent. If the file specification is not
  complete and both a source file and a compiled file exist which might
  match, then which of those files load selects is implementation-dependent. 
So if I stretch this slack and make SBCL's LOAD distinguish a third
implementation-dependent category ("neither a source file nor a
compiled file, it's a directory fer chrissake") and signal a FILE-ERROR,
is that wrong?

-- 
William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...>
"But I'll forgive you a good deal for calling it 'Interesting but slightly
mad.'" -- <http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ddfr+Interesting+but+slightly+mad>
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