[Python-Dev] file system path protocol PEP (original) (raw)

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Wed May 11 17:52:54 EDT 2016

On 05/11/2016 02:28 PM, Nikolaus Rath wrote:

On May 11 2016, Brett Cannon wrote:

This PEP proposes a protocol for classes which represent a file system path to be able to provide a str or bytes representation. [...] As I said before, to me this seems like a lot of effort for a very specific use-case. So let me put forward two hypothetical scenarios to better understand your position: - A new module for URL handling is added to the standard library (or urllib is suitably extended). There is a proposal to add a new protocol that allows classes to provide a str or bytes representation of URLs. - A new (third-party) library for natural language processing arises that exposes a specific class for representing audio data. Existing language processing code just uses bytes objects. To ease transition and interoperability, it is proposed to add a new protocol for classes that represend audio data to provide a bytes representation. Do you think you would you be in favor of adding these protocols to the stdlib/languange reference as well? If not, what's the crucial difference to file system paths?

I think a crucial reason for this work is to unify the stdlib: we currently have four (?) different things that can be or represent a file-system path:

Half of those objects don't work well with the rest of the standard library.

As for your second example, the protocol already exists: it's called bytes. ;)

-- Ethan

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