Alastair Reid
In favour of the configuration file approach, there's the potential for shipping portable bytecode files from one platform to another and it can probably be tweaked to support multiple platforms at once by providing a 'Configuration' abstract data type.
I was thinking about this a little more, and I came up with a small argument against it (or at least part of it): For something like path separators, it seems fine to have Directory.Windows, Directory.Unix, and Directory.Mac, then have Directory.Native bind at compile time. But for something like "configuration file directory", which might be "/etc" on Debian, "/usr/local/etc" on FreeBSD, a wide variety of things on various windows configurations (at least for user configuration files, not sure about system config files), and "/Library/Preferences" on MacOS X, this solution starts to look a little uglier since it requires a module for each platform, which somewhat randomly pollutes the namespace for something like Directory. It's even worse if you assume that we'll run into other modules where this matters. What if we had a module for platform-specific things and submodules for each platform. This would keep all of the platform-specific details localized and easier to maintain. So perhaps we could have Platform.{Debian,FreeBSD,MacOSX,Windows98,Windows2000}.{configDirectory,fileSeparator,etc} or: Platform.{Debian,FreeBSD,MacOSX,Windows98,Windows2000}.Directory.{configDirectory,fileSeparator,etc} and Platform.Native.{configDirectory,fileSeparator,etc} or Platform.Directory.{configDirectory,fileSeparator,etc} which is bound as above. But that sorta stinks because fileSeparator probably belongs in the Directory module. I say that's OK; we can still have: Directory.fileSeparator = Platform.Native.fileSeparator So this still lets you get to the platform specific stuff, but doesn't clutter up random parts of the module hierarchy with platform-specific modules. It lets you treat Directory.fileSeparator in a very natural way for most uses. Opinions? peace, isaac