Good day! If there is an interest in prior art, /and/ there is a motivation in making things future-proof, there is that somewhat elaborate construction coming from Common Lisp: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node203.html Quoting:
The main difficulty in dealing with names of files is that different file systems have different naming formats for files.
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Therefore, Common Lisp provides two ways to represent file names: namestrings, which are strings in the implementation-dependent form customary for the file system, and pathnames, which are special abstract data objects that represent file names in an implementation-independent way.
A particularly intriguing passage, personally, is the following one:
In order to allow Common Lisp programs to operate in a network environment that may have more than one kind of file system, the pathname facility allows a file name to specify which file system is to be used. In this context, each file system is called a host, in keeping with the usual networking terminology.
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Different hosts may use different notations for file names. Common Lisp allows customary notation to be used for each host, but also supports a system of logical pathnames that provides a standard framework for naming files in a portable manner.
I.e. if one squints hard enough, and reads between the lines, some shades of network transparent naming could be seen.. -- с уважениeм / respectfully, Косырев Сергей -- “Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.” -- Frank Herbert, Children of Dune