Next in Review Queue: The New std.path

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:21:49 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:

> "Lars T. Kyllingstad" <public at kyllingen.NOSPAMnet> wrote in message
> news:ivpl34$gf5$3 at digitalmars.com...
>> On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 02:45:02 +0200, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>>
>>> All functions have nice names except fcmp, why the abbreviation?
>>
>> For consistency with std.algorithm.cmp and std.string.icmp, on which it
>> is based.  I'd be open for other suggestions if people think it should  
>> be
>> changed.
>>
>
> I'm happy with it having the obscure name "fcmp" because *all* it is is
> either a case-insensitive or case-sensitive string comparison, and I  
> think
> it's dangerous to blindly use that to compare filepaths. If it were named
> something like "filePathCompare", then people would get a nastly surprise
> when this returned false instead of true:
>
> filePathCompare(r"C:\dir\file.txt", r"C:\dir/foo\..\file.txt");
>
> I can't imagine getting false from that would ever be desirable.
>
> This is a big part of why I think we need a canonical() function  
> (although
> maybe a more like "canonicalPath" for the same reason that we have
> "joinPath" instead of "join").
>
>>
>>> Is expandTilde supposed to work on Windows? I've never seen tilde used
>>> there.
>>
>> Nope, as specified in the docs it is a no-op on Windows.  As Nick points
>> out, it is not obvious what is the correct "home directory" on Windows.
>> Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, there is no precedence for
>> the tilde character to mean "home directory" on Windows at all.
>>
>
> Actually, if Windows did have one single equivalent to "/home/{user}",  
> then
> I think it would be absolutely fantastic to make tilde mean "home  
> directory"
> on Windows. But as things are, that's a moot point, of course.

The typical thing is to use the environment variable USERPROFILE, but  
that's an odd dependency for a string processing library.  Windows also  
doesn't keep the same notion of home directory as Unix does.  You can read  
more about it here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_variable

If that's the only function that uses environment variables, and you can't  
have the function without it, it might be worth having it.  However, we  
must think about how that affects things like purity.

-Steve