From: patrick-may@... (Patrick May) Date: 2002-03-18T16:23:44+09:00 Subject: Re: Some potential RCRs "Sean O'Dell" wrote in message news:... [snip] > I don't agree with the abstraction concept. Mac doesn't even have paths (it > tries to have them, but things aren't tied together using paths, so you run > into a lot of problems with them), so if Ruby is going to virtualize a file > system, it *still* couldn't do anything at all for the 2nd most popular > desktop operating system in the world. Macs have '.' and '..' now ;-) I agree that abstraction or virtualization of the file system shouldn't be the motivation here. However, I think there are other good reasons for this: * convenience -- not having to filter '.' and '..' for most cases * clarity in the special cases -- dir.parent instead of dir['..'] Though dir['..'] should stay and be equivalent to dir.parent -- it's more useful for dir['../../user/patrick/site']. Basically, I think '.' and '..' should be treated as glob characters like '*'. You can specifiy paths with them, but they aren't considered part of the directory. ~ Patrick