Next in Review Queue: The New std.path

[Nick Sabalausky]

"dsimcha" <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:ivo1ef$1ero$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Lars Kyllingstad's new and improved std.path module for Phobos is the next 
> item up in the review queue.
>

Yay!

First of all, very well-written docs :)

My notes:

- For clarity and completeness, the docs for joinPath should include the 
example:

joinPath("foo", "bar");

It does already have joinPath(r"c:\foo", "bar"), but it's easy to overlook 
the fact that's demonstrating the same thing, especially if you're more 
interested in Posix.

- For generic purposes, maybe joinPath should accept being called with just 
one argument? If it already does, then the "Joins two or more path 
components" should change to "Joins one or more path components"

- Maybe there should be a function canonical() that resolves symbolic links, 
runs absolutePath() and normalize(), and on Windows converts to lowercase. 
Doesn't need to be in there right now though, could wait for a later 
release.

- Docs don't say how pathCharMatch handles slash and backslash.

- I really hate to bring up a function-naming issue at this point, but 
"glob" is commonly known to mean "Return all existing files/paths that match 
this pattern" (And that's something we should have at some point, btw, if we 
don't already). So maybe this glob should be called something like globMatch 
or matchGlob instead.

- I don't think I like how glob works. It doesn't seem to know anything 
about directory separators, which seems unintuitive and problematic. I'd 
really like to see it work like this (basically from Ruby):

assert( glob("dir/foo", "dir/*") );
assert( glob("dir/foo", "dir/**") );

assert( !glob("dir/foo/bar", "dir/*") );
assert( glob("dir/foo/bar", "dir/**") );

assert( glob("dir/foo/abc", "dir/*/abc") );
assert( glob("dir/foo/abc", "dir/**/abc") );

assert( !glob("dir/foo/bar/abc", "dir/*/abc") );
assert( glob("dir/foo/bar/abc", "dir/**/abc") );

assert( glob("dir/foo", "dir/f*o") );
assert( !glob("dir/faa/boo", "dir/f*o") );

As it is right now, how would you do a non-recursive star-match? Doesn't 
look like you even can.