Simon Marlow wrote:
It would probably be better to have an abstract FilePath type and to keep the original bytes, decoding on demand. But that is a big change to the API and would break much more code. One day we'll do this properly; for now we have this, which I think is a pretty reasonble compromise.
John Millikin wrote:
Please understand, I am not arguing against the existence of this encoding layer in general. It's a fine idea for a simplistic high-level filesystem interaction library. But it should be *optional*, not part of the compiler or "base.
The problem is that Haskell 98 specifies type FilePath = String. In retrospect, we now know that this is too simplistic. But that's what we have right now.
As implemented in GHC 7.2, this encoding is a complex and untested behavior with no escape hatch.
Isn't System.Posix.IO the escape hatch? Even though FilePath is still used there instead of ByteString as it should be, this is the low-level POSIX-specific library. So the old hack of interpreting the lowest 8 bits as bytes makes a lot more sense there. Thanks, Yitz