Plan for file processing libs

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello David,

Sunday, November 26, 2006, 5:44:55 PM, you wrote:

>> * FilePath operations implemented via Stringable class

> Except that for POSIX systems Stringable isn't the appropriate class for
> FilePath operations, but rather ByteString.

oh, sorry, i considered ByteString here as a sort of string, but unix
filename is just a byte sequence. nevertheless, in order to implement
operations of FilePath module, we should rely on some *encoding*. if
some unixes may use encoding other than utf8/latin1/other ascii-compatible
we have a problem od recognizing this encoding. one cannot extract,
for example, basename without knowing encoding of '.' and '/'

> If you're thinking to rewrite
> the IO libraries using a class to handle the FilePaths (which sounds like a
> wonderful idea), it would make sense to try to think of a portable way to
> do this.

to be exact, IO library (like a System.IO module) has only a few
filepath-related operations - openFile/show/hShow. the main devil is
in FilePath manipulations and filesystem handling. yes, i already
wrote some unicode-enabled code for windows in this area, and emerging
some darcs-based library to promote further development of such code
may be helpful. if there are peoples that can manage such repository
and peoples what will work on unix-related problems, we can start such
project



-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com