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Sat Jan 28 07:56:27 CET 2006 · https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-January/060176.html

>>>>> "Jason" == Jason Orendorff <jason.orendorff at gmail.com> writes:

    Jason> I. Here's an example of the sort of thing you might say if
    Jason> you did *not* think of paths as strings:

[...]

    Jason> II. And here is the sort of thing you'd say if you thought
    Jason> of paths *solely* as strings:

Please note that my point was entirely different from trying to decide
whether to subclass strings.  My point was precisely that because of
this schizophrenia in the use of / as a path join operator in various
string representations of paths, it's a bad choice.  People are
naturally going to write buggy code because they don't have the
implemented spec in mind.

    Jason> Filesystem paths are in fact strings on all operating
    Jason> systems I'm aware of.

I have no idea what you could mean by that.  The data structure used
to represent a filesystem on all OS filesystems I've used is a graph
of directories and files.  A filesystem object is located by
traversing a path in that graph.

Of course there's a string representation, especially for human use,
but manipulating that representation as a string in programs is a
regular source of bugs.  In most cases, the graph is sufficiently
constrained that string manipulations are mostly accurate
representations of graph traversal, but not always, and you get
defects.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
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              ask what your business can "do for" free software.

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Dev] / as path join operator