Re: [boost] Mac OS deprecating paths

From: joel de guzman (djowel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-28 12:43:21

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bill Seymour" :

> Darin wrote:
> >
> > Poor practice, deprecated, two ways to say the same thing.
> >
> 
> Not really.  In standards parlance, to say that a feature is
> deprecated means "Be advised that this feature will likely
> disappear in future versions."  That's a lot stronger than
> saying, "Using this feature is frowned upon by experts."

Exactly. AFAIK, path manipulation and relieance on is "frowned
upon" the classic Mac, not deprecated. Deprecated means
that it will vanish sometime in the future which isn't true
since MacOSX (with a unix base) favors paths (as Darin said).

> > Paths don't work to uniquely identify files on [Mac OS 9].
> >
> 
> I think we might be having a semantic problem here.  Surely
> any OS needs some way for a user to uniquely identify a file.
> Whatever that way is is what I would call a path.  Am I
> missing something?

The name "path" is misleading. For example in the MacOS,
there are FSSpecs and paths which are different.

That is why I suggest not calling it a path since the "path" has
some unwanted meanings. Also, it's not a good name anyway.
A better name is resource-identifier as in URI, or my suggested
CRI (common resource identifier).

--Joel