Pre-PEP: new Path class

[Michael T. Babcock]

>
>
>I see what you're saying. I'd argue (softly) that iterating over
>> the directory entries is the natural interpretation, though.
>  
>
>
>It's far too implicit to my taste; for one since it's a folder-only 
>operation (and I don't see much merit in having separate classes for 
>folder and file paths). Would you also be in favor of interating over 
>  
>
>file-paths meaning iterating over the lines in the file?
>

I was thinking about how I'd expect to use such a class and think 
perhaps neither iterator type should exist.  If an iterator exists for a 
path, it should probably  be for the elements of the path, not what the 
path points to.  These are different objects, in my mind.

 > Path path
 > path.parse("/usr/share/doc")
 > for item in path:
 >     print str(item)
usr
share
doc
 > print str(path[0]) # get top-level path element
/usr
 > print str(path[:-1]) # get parent to path
/usr/share
 > for item in os.pathwalk(path):
 >    # Do stuff
 >    pass
 > f = file(path + "mydoc.txt", "r')
 > f.close()

... any thoughts?  I see a Path object as being very useful, in that it 
can hide the concepts of parsing and using paths from the user, but it 
shouldn't "understand" what its pointing to, whether a pipe or a file or 
a directory or a special device.  Those are features for their own 
specific objects which can use the data stored in a Path object.
-- 
Michael T. Babcock
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/