Re: [MacPerl] `pwd` Bug or Feature?

[John W Baxter <jwblist@olympus.net>]

At 20:00 -0800 3/17/97, Tom Holub wrote:
>While I am not trying to claim that anything Apollo did is correct, this
>might be a better way to handle naming drives than forcing a trailing
>colon.  So,
>
>::MacHD is the root level of a volume named "MacHD"
>::MacHD:Documents:foo is an absolute path to a file (or a directory)
>:Documents:foo is a relative path
>Documents:foo
>foo is a relative path
>
>You could keep MacHD: as referring to the root level, for backward
>compatibility, although on Unix that would also be a relative path.

We don't get to design this...the start of the design (as seen in public)
was in 1984:

without a :, a name is a file name.

With a :, it is volume:file

That was all there was.  When HFS arrived,
   foo
had to remain a file name.

:bar became a file in the current directory.

volume:

became (or remained) a volume name.  And so on.

The only open question is whether
  `pwd`
should return patterns like

  volume:directory
or
  volume:directory:

And existing code suggests the somewhat unfortunate first of those two choices.

   --John