For completeness, here's my reply that got sent off-list... On 24 March 2015 at 12:25, Markus Unterwaditzer wrote:

I'd say treating each part as full-blown Path doesn't make sense from a semantical POV.

Simply mapping Path over the results is also a potential source of bugs, since each part is now a relative path to the CWD, instead of the previous segment.

Fair point. Although I tend to view them as just "relative" - to what depends on context (in this case, "to the preceding bits in the list" is implied). But I agree, people may not be expecting that and so could make mistakes. I still think using strings is equally a bug magnet, though. There's actually no clean way of getting the correct case sensitivity behaviour *apart* from making the parts into path objects. I don't think your suggestion of each part being a prefix of the next would actually help in any of the places I've ever used .parts. Paul PS BTW, did you mean to send to just me rather than the list? I'd like to know what other people think of your point.