>>>>> "Jason" == Jason Orendorff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Jason> I. Here's an example of the sort of thing you might say if
Jason> you did *not* think of paths as strings:
[...]
Jason> II. And here is the sort of thing you'd say if you thought
Jason> of paths *solely* as strings:
Please note that my point was entirely different from trying to decide
whether to subclass strings. My point was precisely that because of
this schizophrenia in the use of / as a path join operator in various
string representations of paths, it's a bad choice. People are
naturally going to write buggy code because they don't have the
implemented spec in mind.
Jason> Filesystem paths are in fact strings on all operating
Jason> systems I'm aware of.
I have no idea what you could mean by that. The data structure used
to represent a filesystem on all OS filesystems I've used is a graph
of directories and files. A filesystem object is located by
traversing a path in that graph.
Of course there's a string representation, especially for human use,
but manipulating that representation as a string in programs is a
regular source of bugs. In most cases, the graph is sufficiently
constrained that string manipulations are mostly accurate
representations of graph traversal, but not always, and you get
defects.
--
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
ask what your business can "do for" free software.
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