On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Darren Duncan wrote:
My proposal is to have all filesystem paths as seen within Perl being
relative paths, and that there are multiple filesystem roots which can be
referred to by name and each relative path is explicitly relative to a named
root; each of these named roots is called a "directory of interest" or "doi".
I briefly mentioned a similar idea, but with no theoretical background
:). I would've called them "bookmarks" instead of "doi", though.
For those who shied away from Darren's large theoretical background,
fearing that it would lead to "pie-in-the-sky" or something, the simple
version of his proposal was to have a magic global hash, and have it work
like:
%*DOI<home> = "/home/foo";
$path = p{home/Music}; # $path points at /home/foo/Music
I disagree with the syntax, but the idea has merit.
Your idea for making everything a relative path isn't one that
appeal to me. But having a predefined set of bookmarks that could be used is
certainly an interesting idea.
I don't like your syntax, though :). But see below.
fsroot - the root of the real file system, analogous to "/"
I think we should stick with / as it's well-understood. Unless the
Windows users among us see some advantage to fsroot -- I'd be happy to discuss
it with them.
fscwd - the dir that was the fs CWD when Perl started up
Stick with $*CWD for this, I reckon, and have it implicit in all paths
that don't start with an absolute path. But all the other variables below
should be absolute paths.
docs - the dir that contains the usual files we want to work with
temp - the dir where we can put temporary files
home - the current user's home dir
mycwd - some other cwd-dir, which is virtual-changeable in Perl
Vote yes to temp and home. Don't understand what you mean by "docs".
So to refer to common things on a Unix system like the fully-qualified ways,
you can write paths like:
fsroot/home/me/myfile
fsroot/usr/bin/perl
fsroot
This is a great example of why fsroot is a bad idea.
For something analogous to traditional CWD sans modifications:
fscwd/mynewfile.txt
fscwd/lib/doit.pl
...and a great example of why fscwd is a bad idea.
To define a new doi at runtime, something like:
%DOI{'mycwd'} = %DOI{'fscwd'};
%DOI{'mycwd'} ~= 'subdir';
# later
my $fh = IO.open( 'mycwd/myfile.txt' );
If I were doing it, I'd make it look like this:
%bookmark<mycwd> = $*CWD;
%bookmark<mycwd>.push('subdir');
# later
my $fh = IO.open( p{#mycwd#/myfile.txt} );
The only part I don't like is marking the "mycwd" with the hashes. I
think we can't do without markers altogether because it would absolutely
confuse everyone :). Putting a hash before and after is also a bad idea
because it's like nothing else in Perl.
The only other idea I can think of is to come up with another quote
adverb/pragma pair. Something like:
use hashinterpolate %*bookmark;
...and have the :hi (short for :hashinterpolate) quote modifier make
$mycwd refer to %*bookmark<mycwd>, and then have :path automatically do :hi as
well, unless :qq is used, or something.
Anyway, I home someone who knows more about Perl interpolation than me
has an idea here.
Anyway, I like my terminology better, because it's less scary, and
I've shaved off some of the scariest bits of syntax from your proposal, but
there is still some work to be done on it here.
HTH,
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| Name: Tim Nelson | Because the Creator is, |
| E-mail: wayl...@wayland.id.au | I am |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----
Version 3.12
GCS d+++ s+: a- C++$ U+++$ P+++$ L+++ E- W+ N+ w--- V-
PE(+) Y+>++ PGP->+++ R(+) !tv b++ DI++++ D G+ e++>++++ h! y-
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
