On Thursday 15 March 2007 19:18, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Surely both FilePath's and command line arguments are sufficiently string like that a reasonable interpretation of them is String? We don't want to provide an interface to Unix, we want to provide a proper abstraction over the underlying details.
It would be a shame if on my Windows box I had to jump through artificial hoops because Posix is a bit broken...
I'm lacking the time to list all those artificial hoops Windows has brought us, so I only urge everybody again: Let's not oversimplify things and handle things the Windows way. Although I would love to have a world where POSIX & friends used Unicode in tons of places, this is simply not the case. FilePath is meant to be an *abstraction*, hiding platform differences, and FilePath = String miserably fails to do this. Haskell got this wrong initially, but I'm hoping that Haskell' addresses this issue. As a compromise, we can leave the current FilePath as it is until things are settled, but I would really like to have a big, fat warning in the documentation then... Cheers, S.