[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Random832]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016, at 09:50, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Adding integers and floats is considered "safe" because most people's
> use of floats completely compasses their use of ints. (You'll get
> OverflowError if it can't be represented.) But float and Decimal are
> considered "unsafe":
> 
> >>> 1.5 + decimal.Decimal("1.5")
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'float' and
> 'decimal.Decimal'
> 
> This is more what's happening here. Floats and Decimals can represent
> similar sorts of things, but with enough incompatibilities that you
> can't simply merge them.

And what such incompatibilities exist between bytes and str for the
purpose of representing file paths? At the end of the day, there's
exactly one answer to "what file on disk this represents (or would
represent if it existed)".