Re: [9fans] Interested in improving networking in Plan 9

["Devon H. O'Dell" <devon.odell@gmail.com>]

2009/8/31 erik quanstrom <quanstro@coraid.com>:
>> 2009/8/31 Bakul Shah <bakul+plan9@bitblocks.com>:
>> > But this is nasty!
>> > % cat ndb/dom/'' # same as ndbquery dom ''
>>
>> No, the nasty part is really that the file should be called `.' and
>> the filesystem reserves dot as the reference to the current directory.
>> You could probably call the file `dot' or `root' (cat ndb/dom/dot or
>> cat ndb/dom/root) as something that shouldn't ever conflict with
>> anything else -- but the root of DNS is not an empty string.
>
> aren't you being a little bit pedantic?  quoting is a fact
> of life.  we don't say that it's evil to need to quote or
> transform things in rc or smtp to deal with local requirements.
> why would it be evil to quote '.'?  and why would be calling
> '.' 'root' or 'dot' rather than '' be any less evil?

It's (in my opinion) slightly less evil because if(!strlen(name))
seems like a pretty poor way to determine that you're looking at the
root zone. It's also more intuitive and easier to document that you're
looking at the root than saying `to find root, look for a file named
as an empty string'. So: less evil because it makes code more
intuitive and it makes documentation easier.

Also, I think I should state that I really don't care about
implementation as long as it's documented, and that the root is not an
empty string. I don't particularly care about quoting at all, and I
don't consider that any reason for one method to be more obtuse than
another.

--dho

> - erik
>
>