On 27.03.2016 00:51, Koos Zevenhoven wrote:
On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 1:13 AM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz mailto:greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
[...] This feels like a slippery slope to me. If we include special syntax for pathnames, why shouldn't we have it for dates and times? Regular expressions? URLs? JSON data? SQL queries? XML data? Where do we draw the line?
Just because you want to draw a line does not necessarily mean, we want to draw one. ;)
I don't think we (as the Python community) can allow ourselves to stand still. We need to have tools that are simple and available. If YAML is the new standard for everything, Python should move. If $ before variable names are the new standard (I hope they never will again), Python should move.
I understand that there are preservers who don't want anything to change. So, compromises will be necessary.
OT:
To be honest, I do think it feels like URL:s are becoming (or have become) just as important as paths, and that pathlib.Path should in the future work with URLs just like it now works with windows and posix paths. The difference between "http://domain.xyz/" and "C:\" is not huge. I also think there should be a Python type (stdlib or builtin), which handles JSON objects nicer than dicts do and has its own literal
That even occurred to me after we talked about the p-string (mainly because I am working in this field, so I basically need both file paths and URIs).
I agree with the URI/IRI idea. It feels natural and sometimes it is necessary to extract specific parts from an URL according to RFC 3986 or 3987. So, +1 from me.
Just for the record: "Path" might not be the most correct wording. There is a "file://" scheme which identifies locally located files. So, paths are basically a subset of URLs speaking functionality-wise. Thus, a better/more generic name would be "URL", "URI", "Link" or the like in order to avoid confusing of later generations. However, I think I could live with Path.
Another thought: requesting URLs. Basically the same as p'/etc/hosts'.write_text(secret). It's really important to have a dead simple library which is able to work with URLs. So, if I could do:
p'https://mysite.com/%7Bpage%7D%27.get()
that'll be awesome.
Best, Sven