Adding System.FilePath

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Sven,

Friday, March 16, 2007, 5:08:00 PM, you wrote:

> I would strongly object against waiting so long, because agreeing on a new I/O
> API will probably take months, and I'm seriously not expecting any kind of
> consensus even within this year for something as fundamental.

> The nice parts about my proposal, as imperfect as it is from a purely 
> theoretical viewpoint, are:

>    * :We can do this *now*.

>    * We can do this incrementally behind the scenes, no big bang is needed.

>    * The Haskell APIs stay as they are at the moment, only the semantics are
> improved.

it is just the source of our current problems with base. of course,
it is easier to add something to base instead of refactoring it. so we
have that we have - more and more features added here and it makes
refcatoring more and more problematic. now FPS team wants to implement
something in Base via bytestrings that will make them unremovable from
base. i think that it is old way, new way to make software is small
building blocks which are maintained independently

there are two i/o libraries alternative to Handles - streams and ssc.
now they are also monolithic but i tried to make analysis and proposed
to split them into two parts - common low-level i/o which hides os
details and high-level part that provides buffering and other
features. SSC author supports this plan too

if we have resources to improve i/o libs, i propose to invest them
into support of these small building blocks instead of further
inflation of base library, which anyway doesn't support all the modern
i/o technologies


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