Re: empty arg in p:exec

I'm just impressed that Norm still remembers the rationale!

-Mike

On 3/22/2010 10:05 AM, David wrote:
> IMHO you need multiple contigous delimiters intact for the cases where 
> you actually want explicit empty arguments.
>
> One might also argue that argument parsing is OS and program specific 
> not just implementation specific.
>
> Some OS's dont have the concept of separate arguments directly but 
> rather a single string  "command line" which the app itself parses.
> Although the obvious cases of this that I know of support separate 
> arguments in C and Java API's then just re-quote them under the hood 
> to pass to the exe ...
> ( e.g. Windows ... )
>
> I personally dont think there is a good solution anywhere between 
> "Single string command line" and fully seperated args aka 
> <arg>arg1</arg> ... with no shortcut syntax (to avoid the arbitrary 
> list of attributes.
>
> Quite literally (and often under appreciated)
> Quoting Is Hard.
>
> http://blog.xmlsh.org/2009/01/quoting-is-hard.html
>
> :)
>
> -------------------------
> David A. Lee
> dlee@calldei.com
> http://www.calldei.com
> http://www.xmlsh.org
>    
>
> On 3/22/2010 8:40 AM, Norman Walsh wrote:
>> Initially we did the obvious thing, delimited arguments by one or more
>> spaces. Then we realized that we needed to handle the case where one
>> of the arguments could include a space. That meant introducing some
>> sort of quoting mechanism. That in turn meant that the args shortcut
>> option would have*at least*  three quoting mechanisms: single and
>> double quotes per XML plus whatever we added. Then there's the
>> question