[Python-ideas] Working with Path objects: p-strings?

[Sven R. Kunze]

On 31.03.2016 17:02, Paul Moore wrote:
> That's a very interesting perspective, and one I'd not fully
> appreciated. Thanks for posting it.

You're welcome.

> There's a lot I still have to think about in your post, but there's
> one point I'd like to comment on already:
>
> On 31 March 2016 at 15:43, Sven R. Kunze <srkunze at mail.de> wrote:
>> When doing so for reading or writing that resource, you actually don't care
>> about whether the path consists of parts or not.
> While that's true for *existing* resources (files) it's not so true
> for when you're creating a file. Like it or not, the filesystem
> imposes a set of container-containee relationships that is the
> directory structure. Your mental model (the application domain view)
> may not care about this, but at the "path" level, we're representing
> the filesystem structure, where directories are real, and so a/b/c
> being a set of 3 nested objects, 2 directories and a leaf object
> (which may be a file or itself a directory) is the reality being
> modeled.
>
> So I'd suggest that your "resource address" is a higher level
> abstraction, layered on top of the filesystem. In many ways, it's a
> URI - and as such may map to a filesystem path or to something else.
> This also clarifies (at least to me) why I am uncomfortable about the
> idea of merging pathlib and URIs - they are at 2 different abstraction
> levels.
>
> It's somewhat interesting to me that the "resource address" level of
> abstraction is a higher level that the "filesystem path" level, but
> has *less* structure. That seems reasonable to me (you abstract away
> the details). And it makes the string representation at the "lowest
> level" the really odd case, as it has *no* structure, and yet it's
> representing a detail level of object structure. Maybe that's an
> indication of why it's useful to have a structured Path object at this
> level rather than working solely with strings?

That all makes perfect sense now.

I didn't expect such a quick and enlightening response. That's awesome. 
Thanks a lot.

That might also influence how we look at the other thread about 
including better URL handling to Python. It's just another abstraction 
level and the main question is: is Python ready for that level or better 
use a third party library for it.

Best,
Sven