[Python-Dev] Path PEP: some comments (equality) (original) (raw)

Jason Orendorff jason.orendorff at gmail.com
Wed Feb 22 19:17:51 CET 2006

On 2/20/06, Mark Mc Mahon <mark.m.mcmahon at gmail.com> wrote:

It seems that the Path module as currently defined leaves equality testing up to the underlying string comparison. My guess is that this is fine for Unix (maybe not even) but it is a bit lacking for Windows. Should the path class implement an eq method that might do some of the following things: - Get the absolute path of both self and the other path - normcase both - now see if they are equal

This has been suggested to me many times.

Unfortunately, since Path is a subclass of string, this breaks stuff in weird ways.

For example: 'x.py' == path('x.py') == path('X.PY') == 'X.PY', but 'x.py' != 'X.PY'

And hashing needs to be consistent with eq: hash('x.py') == hash(path('X.PY')) == hash('X.PY') ???

Granted these problems would only pop up in code where people are mixing Path and string objects. But they would cause really obscure bugs in practice, very difficult for a non-expert to figure out and fix. It's safer for Paths to behave just like strings.

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