After further consideration I realize that the breakage I was concerned about does have some reasonable workarounds. An IOC that needs to link to records with names like [something] or even [some]:other:[thing] can still do so by appending a link flag, a field name or even just a dot to the record name in the INP/OUT link value:
After further consideration I realize that the breakage I was concerned about does have some reasonable workarounds. An IOC that needs to link to records with names like [something] or even [some]: other:[ thing] can still do so by appending a link flag, a field name or even just a dot to the record name in the INP/OUT link value:
field(INP, "[something] NPP")
field(INP, "[something].VAL")
field(INP, "[something].")
My original concern was mainly that such records could never be the target of a link if this change were applied, but that was incorrect.