On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 03:20 -0500, wren ng thornton wrote:
To think about why this distinction is helpful, consider where all we may want to attach the paths/trees we're creating. The two obvious places are / and . but there are other options too. Most programs support some notion of a $PATH variable or allow flags to specify the target directory for reading or writing.
This is a good point. Once you've got a search $PATH of some sort then "./foo" and "foo" are actually different. "./foo" is a complete path and refers to the file (or directory) foo in the current directory while "foo" is an incomplete path that the function will try to complete by looking for a file in each of the search directories. So under a complete/incomplete distinction, a function like exec takes Either Complete Incomplete, where the incomplete ones get the search path treatment and the complete ones do not. Duncan