[Haskell-cafe] Re: File path programme

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

This is a very good summary, and I'm interested to see what you come up 
with.

robert dockins wrote:

> 1) File names are abstract entities.  There are a number of ways one 
> might concretely represent a filename. Among these ways are:
>
>       a) A contiguous sequence of octets in memory
>            (C style string on most modern hardware)
>       b) A sequence of unicode codepoints
>            (Haskell style string)

b') A sequence of octets
   (Haskell style string, in real life)

> 4) In practice, the vast majority of file paths are portable between 
> the various forms; the forms are "nearly" isomorphic, with corner 
> cases being fairly rare.

I don't think they're so rare. I have files on my XP laptop which can't 
be represented in the system code page. It's easy for me to tell which 
programs are Unicode-aware and which aren't.


-- Ben