On Thursday, 6 June 2013 at 07:05:52 UTC, Lars T. Kyllingstad
wrote:
On Wednesday, 5 June 2013 at 06:27:46 UTC, Dylan Knutson wrote:
Hello,
I'd like to open up the idea of Path being an object in
std.path. I've submitted a pull
(https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/1333)
that adds a Path struct to std.path, "which exposes a much
more palatable interface to path string manipulation".
[...]
Let me add some more to this. To justify the addition of such a
type, it needs to pull its own weight. For added value, it could
do one or both of the following:
1. Maintain an isValidPath() invariant, for early error
detection. (On POSIX, this is rather trivial, as any string that
does not contain a null character is in principle a valid path,
but on Windows, the situation is different.)
2. Add in-place versions of path modifiers (setExtension,
setDrive, etc.), for improved performance.
One solution would be for Path to be a trivial string wrapper
which does (1) and not (2). In this case, it is justified to
have Path *in addition to* the existing functions.
Another solution would be for Path to do (2), possibly in
addition to (1). However, in this case it should be a
*replacement* for the existing functions, and not an addition.
Otherwise, we have two almost-equal ways of doing the same thing,
which should be avoided. (I am not advocating this, however, as
it will massively break user code all over again.)
Lars
