From: Johannes Friestad <johannes.friestad@...>
Date: 2005-12-31T03:09:16+09:00
Subject: Re: Path Separator and Windows

On 12/30/05, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/12/05, Justin Johnson <justinjohnson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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

I'm with Austin: Ruby paths should always use '/' and the translation
should be done by the pieces interacting with the system. This is what
Java does, and it's one of the nice things about Java.
The most important benefit is that you can write programs that run on
both Windows and Linux (and Mac and..) without the hassle of a lot of
'if current system is windows..' statements.

jf