Adding System.FilePath

[Sven Panne]

On Thursday 15 March 2007 19:18, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Surely both FilePath's and command line arguments are sufficiently
> string like that a reasonable interpretation of them is String? We
> don't want to provide an interface to Unix, we want to provide a
> proper abstraction over the underlying details.
>
> It would be a shame if on my Windows box I had to jump through
> artificial hoops because Posix is a bit broken...

I'm lacking the time to list all those artificial hoops Windows has brought 
us, so I only urge everybody again: Let's not oversimplify things and handle 
things the Windows way. Although I would love to have a world where POSIX & 
friends used Unicode in tons of places, this is simply not the case. FilePath 
is meant to be an *abstraction*, hiding platform differences, and FilePath = 
String miserably fails to do this. Haskell got this wrong initially, but I'm 
hoping that Haskell' addresses this issue.

As a compromise, we can leave the current FilePath as it is until things are 
settled, but I would really like to have a big, fat warning in the 
documentation then...

Cheers,
   S.