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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Jan 31 11:09:26 CET 2006

"Jason" == Jason Orendorff <jason.orendorff at gmail.com> writes:

Jason> You seem to think that because I said "operating systems",
Jason> I'm talking about kernel algorithms and such.

I can see how you'd get that impression, but it's not true. My reason for mentioning OS-level filesystem was to show that even in that limited domain, treating paths as strings leads to bugs.

Jason> I think paths are used more for communication, less for
Jason> computation.

True. For that purpose it is absolutely essential to have a string represention. However, I was discussing the use of "/" to invoke path composition, which is a computation. Nobody will use that for communication (except to describe a path expression in graph theoretic terms), and I don't think it's a good idea to use that particular symbol for that operation.

-- 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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