os.path.join() necessary?

[Michael Chermside]

Thomas Guettler
 > Is os.path.join() necessary? I use
 > absolute_path=dir + "/" + file
 > on windows (W2K) without problems.

Michael Hudson:
 > Try it on the Mac.

Thomas Guettler
 > I would, but have not Mac or MacOSX here.
 > Can you try it?

Michael Hudson:
 > No, but I can tell you what will happen (in Classic, at least): it
 > won't work.  MacOS <=9 uses colons as path separators.

I think that Thomas is trying to point out is that the path separator on 
Windows is '\' (instead of '/' or ':'). He noticed that the underlying C 
libraries (I *think* that's what does it) will silently convert '/' to 
'\' for him, (and I think it even takes care of the 'C:' stuff that 
Windows wants at the front of the path) so he can avoid the complexity 
of having to use os.path.join().

I think it would be a nice feature of a programming language that all 
file-and-path names are expressed using '/' within the language and 
automatically converted to the platform-appropriate format by the 
language itself (and paths obtained from the OS are converted to '/' 
format also). Unfortunately, as far as I know, Python is not that 
language. I *think* (someone more knowledgable please correct me if I'm 
wrong) that "wierd" OSes like VMS (and there's MUCH wierder stuff out 
there) don't do this conversion. Unix & friends don't need it, Windows 
DOES do the conversion, and I don't know about Macs. But for TRUE 
portability, I believe you still have to deal with os.path.join().

-- Michael Chermside