Re: Ada.Directories

[Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>]

>>>>> "Adam" == Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com> writes:

    Adam> This isn't an easy question.  However, I'd say that it's
    Adam> probably right to treat "." and ".." as nothing special (at
    Adam> least on Unix-type system), since that's what I think users
    Adam> expect; they expect to be able to use "." and ".." as if
    Adam> they were ordinary subdirectory names.  I could be wrong
    Adam> about that.

The fact is they are special, normally you can't have a hard link to a
directory, and as such you normally can't create loops in the
directory structure.

As for this issue, I would be happy if the behaviour was to alway
return "." and ".." or never return "." and ".." regardless of file
system. i.e. the application gets the same results all the time, and
doesn't have to have code that is specific to a filesystem (and might
break if suddenly used on another filesystem).

Perhaps the later might be more useful though, when listing
directories I almost never care about "." and ".." and would have to
filter them out anyway.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>