Re: [boost] candidate for library, "sysutils"

From: Matt Austern (austern_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-03-27 18:31:53

David Abrahams wrote:
> 
> The fun's not over yet, kids: MacOS likes ':'!!
> 
> -Dave
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Thomas Matelich" <sosedada_at_[hidden]>
> To: <boost_at_[hidden]>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 4:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [boost] candidate for library, "sysutils"
> 
> > Craig Henderson wrote:
> >
> > > It must be taken into account during the design of such a library, the
> > > differences between OSs. For example, UNIX '/' and MS '\'. The
> > > description of the isabs() in the Python doc below reads "Return true if
> > > path is an absolute pathname (begins with a slash)." This is true on
> > > UNIX, but with MS absolute pathnames can begin with "C:\" or "\\" for a
> > > UNC path.
> >
> > Just a quick note because people often forget, MS will accept '/' in your
> > code.  All my dir stuff uses '/' exclusively, converting on the way in.
> > Don't bother #ifdef'ing your logic, just the inputs.

And there are other OS's where it starts getting pretty hard 
to have anything that looks like the Unix-ish directory/
subdirectory model, and where defining a single directory
separation character isn't good enough.  I'm thinking of VMS, 
for example (which can be made to look sort of like DOS/Windows 
if you squint hard enough), and of IBM mainframe OS's, like 
VM/CMS.

The question isn't whether you can come up with a convention
that supports everything, because the answer is that you 
can't, but rather how much generality you want to support.

                        --Matt