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

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed May 11 17:57:59 EDT 2016

On Wed, 11 May 2016 at 14:29 Nikolaus Rath <Nikolaus at rath.org> wrote:

On May 11 2016, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> 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?

Maybe for URLs, not for audio data (at least not in the stdlib; community can do what they want).

If not, what's the crucial difference to file system paths?

Nearly everyone uses file system paths on a regular basis, less so than URLs but still a good amount of people. Very few people work with audio data. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20160511/a7c8fc19/attachment.html>

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