Proposal: System.FilePath: current directory should be ".", not ""

[Simon Marlow]

On 04/11/2009 11:56, Felipe Lessa wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Simon Marlow<marlowsd at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> the property doesn't hold any more because dropFileName "foo" == "./". So I
>> worked around cases like this with an internal version of splitFileName with
>> the old semantics.  This isn't a big problem - it just means we get to keep
>> some of these nice simple equality properties, which are arguably wrong
>> anyway, and fewer "./" prefixes will show up to surprise users.
>
> If FilePath was a newtype, could its Eq instance not distinguish
> between "foo" and "./foo"?  Note that we must distinguish "./foo/../"
> of "./" because this may not be valid ("foo" does not exist) or may be
> something different ("foo" is a symlink).  This Eq instance would just
> eat all superfluous "./".

Yes, but FilePath is not a newtype, and it would break a lot of code to 
make it one.  That is not part of this proposal.

Just in case this isn't clear: like most people, I (still) believe 
FilePath should be an abstract type, but that's a matter for separate 
discussion.  Right now I'm concerned about fixing a small problem with 
the current API.

Cheers,
	Simon