On 6/6/2013 8:57 AM, Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
On Thursday, 6 June 2013 at 15:41:51 UTC, Dylan Knutson wrote:
FWIW, having Path be an object adds consistency with the rest of Phobos, which
has many entities which could be expressed as primitives, expressed as
objects. To name a few, DateTime is an object, File is an object, and DirEntry
is an object. Yes, they could be described as integers, or a pointer, or a
string, but it's less cognitive load on the developer to recognize them as
separate types.
"Reducing cognitive load" is not the main reason these are objects. DateTime
lumps together no less than six integers. File adds automatic resource
management via reference counting. DirEntry caches file information to avoid
repeated filesystem lookups. And so on.
It's hard to see what value there is in a type that is simply a wrapper around
an existing type, and which provides implicit conversions too/from that existing
type so that they can be intermixed arbitrarily.
At the end, that's nothing more than:
alias string Path;
