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

[Simon Taylor]

On 15-Jul-2003, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 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.

In which case that program is buggy -- the filesystem doesn't care
about the trailing slash, so any program which does is wrong.

Simon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-reviews mailing list
post:  mercury-reviews at cs.mu.oz.au
administrative address: owner-mercury-reviews at cs.mu.oz.au
unsubscribe: Address: mercury-reviews-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe
subscribe:   Address: mercury-reviews-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------