[Haskell-cafe] File path programme

[David Roundy]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 02:17:01PM +0000, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> >  > pathToForeign :: p -> IO (Ptr CChar)
> >  > pathFromForeign :: Ptr CChar -> IO p
> > 
> > This interface is problematic. Is the pointer returned by pathToForeign 
> > a heap pointer which the caller is supposed to free? If so, a Ptr CChar 
> > instance would have to copy the pathname every time. And I don't 
> > understand exactly what pathFromForeign is supposed to do.
> 
> I presume that it's meant to be the fundamental un-marshalling
> function for the Path class. But it seems Unix-specific; on Windows,
> filenames wouldn't normally be converted to CChars.

No, it's not Unix-specific, it's portable.  If you want to write portable C
code, you have to use the standard library, which means that file names are
represented as Ptr CChar.

Even on Windows, one can program in C, so there does exist a mapping from
windows file names to Ptr CChar.  It may be that this mapping sometimes
fails (i.e. some files may not be accessible via the C standard library),
but if this happens one can just throw an exception.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net