Greetings, I've been looking over some of the file-related modules such as System.Directory and System.Posix.{Directory,Files}, and I have some questions. * Excuse my ignorance of Windows, but I'm assuming that the System.Posix module does not exist on Windows? Is windows the only system where this is the case? * I've noticed that System.Directory.renameFile behaves differently between ghci, nhc, and hugs. In particular, ghc is the only one who complains when it's a directory. Is there anything evil about using renameFile to rename a directory? It would be nice if they all acted the same, particularly since renameDirectory is conveniently located in the same module. * Speaking of which, in System.Posix, the Directory and File operations are broken up into separate modules. It is a little odd to have file related functions in System.Directory. Should they be moved? * Some languages have a means of building paths in a portable way. It would be nice if we had access a file separator (like "/" in unix and "\" in windows). These would probably belong in the System.Directory module? Java (for instance) allows access to these things through the java.lang.system.getProprerty function. That function takes a string and returns a string: "path.separator" Path separator (for example, ":") "file.separator" File separator (for example, "/") "user.home" User home directory "user.name" User account name // might come in useful: "os.arch" Operating system architecture "os.name" Operating system name "os.version" Operating system version Now using getProperty for this makes sense in Java, but for Haskell, I would expect to have functions for these. I'm not sure where all of them would go. Is there any roadblock to implementing something like this? * Another item that would be useful in the System.Directory class would be some kind of config file path. On Debian, that would be "/etc", on some systems, it might tend to be more often "/usr/local/etc". (I'm not sure if there's a good way to abstract the difference between a user config file and a system config file. User config files tend to be in ~/ and start with a dot whereas system config files end up in /etc, and don't start with a dot.) These last few points are rather related in that they are both dependent on particular operating systems, and a means of abstracting away system-specific details in order to write more portable code. Are any of these good ideas? peace, isaac