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From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-09-20 11:35:47


From: "Beman Dawes" <bdawes_at_[hidden]>
> At 08:49 PM 9/19/2002, Glen Knowles wrote:
>
> >I think of the windows c:, d: as being analogous to the host name of a
> URL.
> >From my viewpoint these are all absolute paths:
> >
> >http://host.com/foo/bar
> >http:/foo/bar
> >c:/foo/bar
> >/foo/bar
> >
> >The first two are both defined as absolute URLs, with and without an
> >authority. I believe "absolute" and "drive" are orthogonal.
>
> If you go down that road, then you need another term to describe a path
> that has both. Peter Dimov's [make_]absolute needs another name, because
> it has a postcondition that the returned path both "has_drive" and
> "has_root_directory".

To be more precise, it has a postcondition "the returned path does not
depend on the current directory, drive, or other implementation defined
global state".

/foo/bar (under Windows) has different meaning depending on which drive is
current, and is therefore not "absolute" by the above definition. It is
absolute under POSIX. Of course if we adopt the other meaning of "absolute"
we need another term for self-contained paths.


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