Re: filenames in error messages

[Karl Berry]

    | "C escapes" means to use the backslash character as escape character.
    | This is a particularly bad choice, because - as you know - on some 
systems,
    | backslahes are used as directory separator.

That hardly seems an insurmountable objection to me, since
(1) many such paths will not have any special characters (such as : or a
control character), and therefore will not be quoted, and therefore the
\'s will just appear as-is, and
(2) for those paths which are quoted, the \'s just get doubled. Big deal.

Using \ is soooooo conventional in these situations.  I'd find it very
strange for the coding standards to recommend uri-style % escapes.  Of
course it will suffice, any quoting mechanism will suffice, what is
*natural* for compiler-like error messages in our world?  \.  IMHO.

karl