From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2005-12-31T02:55:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Path Separator and Windows

On 30/12/05, Justin Johnson <justinjohnson@gmail.com> wrote:
> Regardless of the history I am still of the opinion that something
> should change. From this thread it seems that Ruby may have chosen to
> use / everywhere to keep things consistent. Can anyone confirm that
> this really is the decision? If so, it presents the following problems
> for Windows users.
>
> 1) When a program displays paths back to users they all use / instead
>    of \ which isn't consistent with how the OS presents the paths to
>    the user.

I don't personally see this as an issue. I might think that having a
method #localize for Pathname might be good that does the conversion for
you.

> 2) Trying to run a program in backticks for example with the paths
>    using / fails.

Then backticks, %x{}, and Kernel#system should probably look for / in
the command portion and change it to backslash.

> I think a reasonable solution would be to allow the programmer to
> configure how Ruby will behave, for example by allowing them to change
> a global variable for the path separator. I figured this would be
> doable but haven't found a way to do so yet. I also still think it
> makes more sense to default to the line separater the OS uses, which
> is \ for Windows regardless of what the API allows.

I disagree completely. Ruby's paths should always use '/' and the pieces
of Ruby which interact with the command-processor and/or the filesystem
should do the separator translation.

-austin
--
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca