[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #56809] Dots in script file names should be allowed

[Michael Leitner]

Follow-up Comment #5, bug #56809 (project octave):

Not exactly. In my view you do not have to search the string for a script
file, you just take the whole string, append a ".m", and see if you find a
corresponding script file. In this sense, the secondary grammar is trivial.
And the primary grammar would be even simplified compared to the present case,
because as it is, it seems to have a notion of which script files exist, and
it even matches the tokens it finds against names of script files, even though
this will only ever work if the string name encompasses the whole expression.
In my proposal, you could drop the concept of script files completely from the
primary grammar. And you do not have to care about spaces: issuing "my script"
would fail in the primary grammar, but if there exists a file "my script.m",
octave would happily execute it (the days of DOS' 8.3 file name restrictions
are long gone, and spaces can be parts of file names in general, so why not in
octave scripts?). 

Why do you think that this is not a good idea, apart from the argument that is
always valid, namely that there is an existing solution that works in most
cases, while a potentially better solution would need human effort?


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