[Haskell-cafe] Re: File path programme

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

Peter Simons wrote:

 >The module currently knows only _relative_ paths. I am still
 >experimenting with absolute paths because I have recently
 >learned that on Windows something like "C:foo.txt" is
 >actually relative -- not absolute. Very weird.

"\foo.txt" is also relative on Win32. And "con.txt" is absolute.

 >There also is a function which changes a path specification
 >into its canonic form, meaning that all redundant segments
 >are stripped. So although two paths which designate the same
 >target may not be equal, they can be tested for equivalence.

Again, while this transformation may be useful in some cases, it is not 
a canonicalization operation. "foo/../bar" and "bar" do not in general 
refer to the same file, and "foo" and "foo/." are not in general 
equivalent. We shouldn't encourage these misconceptions in the library, 
even if we do provide a path-collapsing transformation along these lines.

Other comments:

The Read and Show instances aren't inverses of each other. I don't think 
we should be using Read for path parsing, for this reason.

I don't understand why the path ADT is parameterized by segment 
representation, but then the Posix and Windows parameter types are both 
wrappers for String. It seems artificial to distinguish read :: String 
-> RelPath Windows from read :: String -> RelPath Posix in this way.

In general, this library doesn't seem to deal with any of the hard 
cases. The devil's in the details.

-- Ben