Re: [boost] Re: the first version of abstract path manipulation class (interface)

From: joel de guzman (djowel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-25 23:47:12

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jesse Jones" :

> At 12:22 AM +0800 1/26/02, joel de guzman wrote:
> >----- Original Message -----

> >Have anyone considered the classic Macintosh (pre X) where the extension
> >does not mean anything, the directory separator is the : and with 
> >max 32 chars?
> >File paths manipulation is frowned upon since the system actually has
> >true file descriptors with meta-file information and does not get invalidated
> >when someone moves the file somewhere else while the application is
> >working on it.
> 
> To expand on this: on the Mac OS (even OS X) it's considered poor 
> practice to use path names. Instead FSSpecs or the new FSRef's should 
> be used. I've written "path" classes for Mac and Windows before, but 
> you have to get away from the notion of a path and take a higher 
> level view of the problem space. You'd also have to pollute the 
> classes with some platform specific code since Mac users will want to 
> initialize the class with an FSRef and get the FSRef the object 
> points to.

Indeed!

Coming from a Mac background, I've written a cross-platform application 
framework that has, among other things, a class file_descriptor that abstracts 
file specifications, paths etc. Supporting a multitude of file-path formats will 
result in an N^N converters. What I did instead was have 2N converters
that convert to and from a common format such as a URI. Yes, this was 
one of the *first* use of the Spirit parser framework.

{ nope, I'm not trying to sell anything... just FYI :-}

Regards,
--Joel