[m-rev.] for review: library changes for `mmc --make' on Windows

[Fergus Henderson]

On 15-Jul-2003, Simon Taylor <stayl at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> We're coming at this from different angles. My opinion is that
> a path name should conceptually be an abstract type. Any user
> code depending on the presence or absence of slashes on the end
> of a directory name is broken.  In the same way, user code can't
> assume anything about directory separators in the paths returned
> from the dir module.

But directory names and path names are strings.  So they are not abstract.

An important operation that you might want to do with such names
is to write them to a file which might be used by another program.
That other program might not be written in Mercury, and might
behave differently depending on whether the directory name has
a trailing slash.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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