Re: Ada.Directories problems, a summary

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:d6mq43hiz19n$.1x02dgs0h5862$.dlg@40tude.net...
> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009 16:57:07 -0600, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>
>> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote
>>
>>> After experimenting with Ada.Directories I collected the issues I think
>>> must be addressed to make Ada.Directories more usable:
>>
>> You should send your suggestions to Ada-Comment as a comment on AI05-0049
>> (which is about various additions to Ada.Directories). I'm supposed to
>> working on that in the next month or so, and I wouldn't mind a discussion 
>> on
>> it. But not here...it should be done in the context of the AI so it can 
>> be
>> recorded there.
>
> I don't have a concrete proposal, it was merely complains than something
> constructive. So I wished to hear what other people think about it. At
> least to grope after the range of changes felt necessary/desired. For
> example, I would like to have different string types for simple name,
> directory name, full (absolute) name. There are other general design
> issues. Like a clean separation of physical and path/name-only file
> operations. Desired? Possible? (in the context of case-insensitive issue
> under Windows)

They're already completely separated (the AARM makes this clearer), so I'm 
not quite sure what you mean. The operations on strings are completely 
logical, never physical; they make no use of the machine state (other than 
the name of the current directory). If the wording doesn't make that clear, 
that's probably my fault, but it surely is the intent.

(I would have preferred that those operations were in a totally separate 
package from Ada.Directories, but I lost that argument.)

> Thank you for the AI number.
>
> BTW, can Ada-Comment become a news group rather than a mailing list?

Why would we want to go from one stone-age technology to another? Besides, 
the point of Ada-Comment is to be all-inclusive -- everybody has access to 
e-mail. Access to newsfeeds has been getting harder to come by, and lots of 
people don't have good access (my ISP doesn't offer any, for instance). I 
could see going to some web-based format (perhaps a blog), but that would 
imply a need for more filtering than now, not less (link spammers are a 
major problem for blogs). Not sure what we'd gain other than prettier text.

                                          Randy.