[path-PEP] Path inherits from basestring again

[Stefan Rank]

[__div__ for .joinpath()]

on 29.07.2005 04:48 Tony Meyer said the following:
>>I, herewith, claim to have used it in the past.
>>But I am indifferent as to if its needed, it just looks natural to me.
> 
> So far there seem to have been a few +0s, but no +1s...
> 
>>What I use quite often is::
>>
>>   path(__file__).dirname() / "somesiblingfileiknowisthere"
>>
>>you do not have to think about trailing slashes or absolute vs. 
>>relative. and its much better than::
>>
>>   from os.path import *
>>   join(dirname(__file__), "somesiblingfileiknowisthere")
> 
> In what way is this "much better"?

because of the 'object-orientedness'.
i hope we agree on that (that's the reason for a path PEP?).

the first is only sugar for the explicit::

   path(__file__).dirname().joinpath("blablablabalbal")

and as i said +0

operator overloading is only good if it's intuitive for the majority.
(or Guido i suppose, in case this majority-person does not show up)

[snip]

> Would you really choose this:
> 
>     p = Path() / "build" / "a" / "very" / "very" / "long" / "path"
(Path() is the current dir I think)
> 
> Over this:
> 
>     p = Path(os.path.join("build", "a", "very", "very", "long", "path"))
> 
> ?  A saving of six characters, and the second one is a lot clearer.  If
> there was a os.path.joinPath (or whatever name) function that returned a
> Path object rather than a string, then you'd get:
> 
>     p = joinPath("build", "a", "very", "very", "long", "path")
> 
> Which is better (clearer, more concise) than either of the others, IMO.

actually for explicitness i would choose: (original jorendorff)::

   p = path("build").joinpath("any", "path", "you", "can", "imagine")

or otherwise maybe::

   p = path("alpha") / "and" / "omega"