Abstract FilePath Proposal

[Erik Hesselink]

I think this proposal is currently underspecified. For example, it's
not clear to me what the semantics of a FilePath are. I have the
feeling that `toFilePah` should return a Maybe, for example, but it's
hard to say without knowing what it's converting to, exactly.

I also worry about the immense breakage this will cause. This is not
just an issue of causing a lot of work for maintainers, but also of
lots of unmaintained libraries, printed code etc breaking. I feel that
there is not enough gain in this proposal relative to the amount of
breakage.

Has any thought been given to introduce new modules for this type, and
leave the old ones in place?

Erik

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 6:08 PM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvr at gnu.org> wrote:
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> Hello *,
>
> What?
> =====
>
> We (see From: & CC: headers) propose, plain and simple, to turn the
> currently defined type-synonym
>
>   type FilePath = String
>
> into an abstract/opaque data type instead.
>
> Why/How/When?
> =============
>
> For details (including motivation and a suggested transition scheme)
> please consult
>
>   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Proposal/AbstractFilePath
>
>
>
> Suggested discussion period: 4 weeks
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