[Python-ideas] PEP 428 - object-oriented filesystem paths

[Ethan Furman]

Andrew McNabb wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 06, 2012 at 08:41:05AM +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On 06/10/12 05:53, Andrew McNabb wrote:
>>
>>> Path concatenation is obviously not a form of division, so it makes
>>> little sense to use the division operator for this purpose.
>> But / is not just a division operator. It is also used for:
>>
>> * alternatives: "tea and/or coffee, breakfast/lunch/dinner"
>> * italic markup: "some apps use /slashes/ for italics"
>> * instead of line breaks when quoting poetry
>> * abbreviations such as n/a b/w c/o and even w/ (not applicable,
>>   between, care of, with)
>> * date separator
> 
> This is the difference between C++ style operators, where the only thing
> that matters is what the operator symbol looks like, and Python style
> operators, where an operator symbol is just syntactic sugar.  In Python,
> the "/" is synonymous with `operator.div` and is defined in terms of the
> `__div__` special method.  This distinction is why I hate operator
> overloading in C++ but like it in Python.

'/' is just a symbol.  One common interpretation is as division, but 
that is not its only purpose.  It's not even one of the first two 
symbols I learned for division when I was younger.

~Ethan~