Dev] / as path join operator (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Thu Jan 26 05:21:10 CET 2006

"Steven" == Steven Bethard <steven.bethard at gmail.com> writes:

Steven> My only fear with the / operator is that we'll end up with
Steven> the same problems we have for using % in string formatting
Steven> -- the order of operations might not be what users expect.

Besides STeVe's example, (1) I think it's logical to expect that

Path('home') / 'and/or'

points to a file named "and/or" in directory "home", not to a file named "or" in directory "home/and".

(2) Note that '/' is also the path separator used by URIs, which RFC 2396 gives different semantics from Unix. Most of my Python usage to date has been heavily web-oriented, and I'd have little use for / unless it follows RFC 2396. By that, I mean that I would want the / operator to treat its rhs as a relative reference, so the result would be computed by the algorithm in section 5.2 of that RFC. But this is not correct (realpath) semantics on Unix.

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