Path as an object in std.path

[Dylan Knutson]

On Thursday, 6 June 2013 at 16:06:50 UTC, Lars T. Kyllingstad 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 6 June 2013 at 14:51:13 UTC, Dylan Knutson wrote:
>> I should have said "makes it easier to be platform 
>> independent". Normalization is done automatically on 
>> comparison.
>
> Yes, p1 == p2 sure looks nice, but unbeknownst to the API user, 
> it comes at the cost of several memory allocations, and it does 
> not perform a case-insensitive comparison on Windows in its 
> current form.  (Should it?  I dunno.)

It doesn't do any allocations that the user won't have to do 
anyways. Paths have to be normalized before comparison; not doing 
so isn't correct behavior. Eg, the strings `foo../bar` != `bar`, 
yet they're equivalent paths. Path encapsulates the behavior. So 
it's the difference between

buildNormalizedPath(s1) == buildNormalizedPath(s2);

and

p1 == p2;