[path-PEP] Path inherits from basestring again

[Michael Hoffman]

Reinhold Birkenfeld wrote:

> * __iter__() iterates over the parts().
> * the following methods raise NotImplemented:
>   capitalize, expandtabs, join, splitlines, title, zfill

Why? They *are* implemented. I do not understand this desire to wantonly 
break basestring compatiblity for the sake of breaking compatibility.

Once you break compatibility with basestring you can no longer use a 
path anywhere that you could have used a str or unicode before. With 
compatibility broken, the only possible supported way of passing paths 
to third-party functions will be to cast the path with 
path.__bases__[0](mypath) before passing it anywhere else. You can't 
even use str() because you don't know what the base class of the path 
is. What a pain.

 From the original path.py documentation:

"""
os.path.join doesn't map to path.join(), because there's a string method 
with that name. Instead it's path.joinpath(). This is a nuisance, but 
changing the semantics of base class methods is worse. (I know, I tried 
it.) The same goes for split().
"""

It ain't broke. Please stop breaking it.
-- 
Michael Hoffman