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From pescadero.stanford.edu!expo.lcs.mit.edu!xpert-mailer  Thu May 31 15:13:41 1990 remote from convex
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To: ben@cv.hp.com
Cc: xpert@expo.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: use of backslash in resource specifiers
In-Reply-To: Your message of 30 May 90 16:25:05 GMT.
             <100920222@hpcvlx.cv.hp.com> 
Date: Thu, 31 May 90 08:32:18 -0400
From: convex!expo.lcs.mit.edu!rws (Bob Scheifler)

    Why can't the gods of Xt implement backslash processing for reading the
    left-hand side of the resource specifier?

It doesn't exist because it is unnecessary as currently specified.

    A trivial bug and a trivial fix.

It isn't obvious to me that it's a "bug".  Nor is it obvious that just
introducing a quote form is sufficient to "fix" the problem.  You have to
assume that no code in Xt or Xlib ever concatenates strings together to
form resource specifiers, I'd guess you have to introduce a quote form into
arguments of XrmGetResource and other functions (none of which currently have
any such quote forms, for left or right side), and perhaps other things I
haven't thought of.  If you would like to think this through and submit a
complete specification, with a rationale and an implementation/performance
impact statement (or better yet patches), I'm sure people would be happy to
consider making Xlib even more complicated than it already is. :-)