I guess it's just that I'm more concerned with making possible what is currently impossible (according to the library standards)--that is, using FFI and IO on the same file--rather than just adding utility features that application developers could have written themselves. I suppose we don't need a class for this, all we need is a couple of functions to convert between FilePath and CString.
Except paths are different on different platforms... for example: /a/b/../c/hello\ there/test and: A:\a\b\ notice how the backslash is used to 'escape' a space or meta-character on unix, but is the path separator for windows. If you want to write portable applications, then you dont want to hard code the platform type. So converting from the datatype to a string is not simple: string = pathToString ... one way of doing this is to have pathToString call a function to determine the system type and construct the string accordingly. The problem here is that it is not extensible by the user, the supported platforms are determined by the library. By using a class we can let the user define translations for new platforms... Keean.