[Python-Dev] / as path join operator

Neil Hodgson nyamatongwe at gmail.com
Sat Jan 28 22:42:41 CET 2006


Stephen J. Turnbull:

>     Jason> Filesystem paths are in fact strings on all operating
>     Jason> systems I'm aware of.
>
> I have no idea what you could mean by that.  The data structure used
> to represent a filesystem on all OS filesystems I've used is a graph
> of directories and files.  A filesystem object is located by
> traversing a path in that graph.
>
> Of course there's a string representation, especially for human use,

   Not always. IIRC very old MacOS used an integer directory ID and a
string file name. The directory ID was a cookie that you received from
the UI and passed through to the file system and there was little
support for manipulating the directory ID. Textualized paths were
never supposed to be shown to users.

   Neil


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