[phobos] next release (meaning of path)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday 03 January 2011 15:32:09 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I discussed this in the past with a colleague (from the ng I think). The
> conclusion was that the sliver of users who need facilities to convert
> path formats from one OS to another is extremely thin.

I've definitely run into it. The main problem being that it's very easy to have 
file names which are legal on Linux but illegal on Windows. Now, unless you're 
writing a program that's specifically looking to convert file names from one 
naming scheme to another, then the odds are that it won't be an issue, because 
the program will likely only be dealing with files that's been given on the 
current system and those will obviously have correct file names. So, it wouldn't 
surprise me in the least if the number of programmers who actually needed to 
worry about whether a file name that they're dealing with is legal on the current 
OS or on another OS is probably fairly small. It _would_ be useful to have 
functions to deal with that though. It's just that it wouldn't be a particularly 
high priority issue to add that sort of thing, and if std.path were particularly 
cluttered (which I don't think that it is), then adding those sort of functions 
would probably be a bad idea. I do think that they'd be nice to have though.

- Jonathan M Davis