Adding System.FilePath

[Sven Panne]

On Thursday 15 March 2007 19:43, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> What would the warning say?
>
> "Haskell currently does not work when reading files or accessing
> command line arguments on Unix. Until such time as this is fixed
> please avoid opening files, or allowing the user to pass command line
> flags. The workaround is to either use Windows or Perl." :-)

At least this would be a starting point... ;-)

> Do you have a concrete proposal for what FilePath's should look like
> in Haskell'? "FilePath = String" is currently the least broken design,
> since no one has put forward a better one.

Of course I can't come up with an elaborate proposal in 5 minutes, but I think 
the main points should be:

   * FilePath is abstract, perhaps even constructed from FilePathElements 
(there are pros and cons for introducing the latter, I'm not totally sure 
about all implications).

   * Explicit operations for constructing and accessing a FilePath are 
provided.

   * Operations like the ones in your proposal are provided.

Before one can make a concrete proposal, a proposal for a general encoding 
framework is needed and should be standardized, because we need a "fit" here. 

Another option would be handling things exactly the other way round: FilePath 
could be a synonym for ByteString, so things could look like the following 
(assuming functions from our imaginary encoding framework) :

   ...
   entries1 <- getDirectoryContents (encode utf8 "blah")
   mapM_ (putStrLn . decode utf8) entries1
   entries2 <- getDirectoryContents myByteString
   ...

But in general, I have a bad feeling about type synonyms for such cases...

Cheers,
   S.