On Thursday, 6 June 2013 at 19:29:08 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Thursday, June 06, 2013 14:38:41 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 6/6/13 2:13 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> An example of a strong justification for a redo is, for
>> example,
>> conversion
>> to use ranges. std.zip needs that treatment.
>
> Agreed.
Key to success for Path: somehow get it on the ranges
bandwagon :o).
LOL. Well, given that strings are _already_ ranges, that
wouldn't help it
anywhere near as much as it does with other cases of code
breakage, since
std.path is already quite range-ready.
- Jonathan M Davis
Something I wanted to add:
I think using string as the main form of representation for a
path is fine.
However, there are times where it is convenient to be able to
explode a path into a structure, where each part is clearly
separate from the next. This makes it easy to do certain
otherwise hard to do operations. eg:
Change:
C:\Users\Monarch\Docs\MyFile.txt
to
D:\Users\Monarch\MyFile.txt
Regexes are fun and all, but they do come with their own
complications, and pitfalls. And they *do* require efforts to
write. Or use the existing interface. It works, I won't argue
agains it, but I do find times where it is kind of clunky.
I'd be in favor of having a "Path" object, if only for being able
to help in the construction or modification of string paths.
For example, I imagine something as:
string oldPath = `C:\Users\Monarch\Docs\MyFile.txt`:
Path myPath = Path(oldPath);
myPath.drive = 'D';
myPath.folders = myPath.folders[0 .. $ - 1];
string newPath = myPath.build;
I think it would be useful to have that. None of the existing
interfaces change. It's just an optional tool that I think would
be convenient.
--------
If I may present an analogy: C deals with "time" using the
arithmetic "time_t" primitive. It works, is mostly convenient,
and is the standard API. Still, C also proposes the "struct tm",
which is a time, exploded into year/month/day/hours/min/sec.
You can do nothing with this type, except, well read and write to
it, and convert it back to/from time_t. Yet, is has its uses, if
only being presented in a way that might be more natural to
manipulate. And that is reason enough for its existence.
