I discussed this in the past with a colleague (from the ng I think). The
conclusion was that the sliver of users who need facilities to convert
path formats from one OS to another is extremely thin.
Andrei
On 1/3/11 5:13 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Monday 03 January 2011 14:42:01 Jesse Phillips wrote:
I do not know of a good reason for having a Path type. However I do
believe much can be added to help with manipulated paths. Here are
some issues I've had.
* Converting to the proper sep
* getBaseName(getName(file)) will give just the filename and no path
when there is no extension, switching the calls gives you nothing.
* A quoted path is sometimes valid, and some times not. Namely making
system calls needs the quotes or escaped spaces, while std.file
expects none of that.
* It should be easy to convert one OS path style to another. (Ignoring
drive letter)
A fancier feature would be to have a function which converts a file name to one
which is valid for the current OS. Which characters are valid does vary somewhat
from file system to file system, but it's OS-specific enough that it can be
done.
Windows OSes have a specific set of characters that they disallow regardless of
the underlying file system, and Linux file systems disallow the null character
and
sometimes / (so, if you just assume that the null character and / are the only
disallowed characters, you should be fine). I'm not sure what Mac OS X does
though. In any case, having a function which will convert characters if
necessary to make the file name valid for the current OS would be useful for
cross-platform compatability, and it doesn't require a path type.
If we're looking to try and abstract out some of the path stuff a bit better
without having a separate path type, then having a function like Haskell's
combine, which concatenates two parts of a path with the appropriate separator
(so, effectively part1 ~ sep ~ part2) would help (it would clean up code too,
though you obviously don't _need_ such a function, since we _can_ just
concatenate with sep). There are probably other, similar functions that we could
add which would help with abstracting out some of the system-specific, path pain
without needing a separate path type.
- Jonathan M Davis
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