> But for a while is was painful to use, 'cause there was som much code
> that still used strings for paths. That was made a lot better when we
> introduced the __fspath__ protocol, and then updated the standard
> library to use it (everywhere?).
Unfortunately not [1]. The __fspath__ protocol is supported in
locations where a path is expected as an argument (e.g. os.path.join());
anywhere else it is not supported except by accident (meaning it could
easily become actually unsupported in the future).
I guess this is why some folks though making PATH a subclass of str might be a good idea in the first place.
So a new idea (very poorly thought out) -- make a StrPath that is both a subclass of Path and a str -- so it could be used for things like __file__, and code that expects a string will still work, and code that expects a Path object will work as well. Since both Path and str are immutable, str methods would return strings, and Path methods would return Path objects.
I haven't looked for name clashes yet, but does this seem possible?
-CHB
--
Christopher Barker, PhD
Python Language Consulting
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