[Haskell-cafe] RE: ANN: System.FilePath 0.9

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 03:29:01PM +0200, Udo Stenzel wrote:
> Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> > Also, it looks from this that you treat paths differently depending on
> > whether they end in a separator.  Yet this makes no difference to the
> > system.  That seems wrong to me.
> 
> Not to the system, but some programs like to make a difference.

How does it make a difference?  Do you have an answer that applies
uniformly to all programs?  If not, aren't we just walking down a blind
alley?  I've heard that Emacs treats double-separators specially.  Do we
account for that too?

Maybe the trailing slash is important enough to take into account.  But
it complicates things, and the problem is hard enough with out it.  So I
say, leave it out.

(In my design, with a different type for different systems, it would be
possible to create types for rsync paths, or Emacs paths, etc.  That
might be a better approach to the problem.)

Andrew