[Haskell-cafe] File path programme

[robert dockins]

> Even simple manipulations break in the presence of encoding issues, or 
> even just of unusual paths.  What is the extension of "\\.\TAPE0" ?  Its 
> not "\TAPE0".  BTW this is a valid path on Windows 2000 upwards.  If you 
> don't care about corner cases, then you have no worries.  It would be 
> nice to have correct handling for all valid paths on each supported OS 
> though.

Urk.  This is a terrible example, sorry.  Still, the point is that 
unusual paths can break simple seeming string manipulations.