Re: How to get the preferred environment variable path separator?

[Thompson, David]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 11:36 AM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2016 10:24:56 -0400
>> From: "Thompson, David" <address@hidden>
>> Cc: Guile User <address@hidden>, Chris Marusich <address@hidden>
>>
>> The environment variable path separator is *not* defined depending on
>> the OS.  It is up to the programs that interpret these search paths to
>> specify what the separator should be.  ":" is the most common
>> separator, but that is just convention.  A search path is opaque to
>> the operating system, where environment variables are just strings
>> with no inherent meaning.
>
> We are not talking about the OS, we are talking about the programs
> that set and query environment variables using 'getenv', 'putenv', and
> other similar APIs, followed by simple string processing.  And those
> are definitely _not_ treating the separator as opaque, something you
> can easily verify both by looking at the sources of the respective
> applications, and by simple experiments.
>
> And in that sense, the path separator character is always ':' on Posix
> systems and ';' on MS-Windows.  So I think Guile ought to have such a
> variable; Emacs, for one, does.

OK, sure.