PEP on path module for standard library

[Neil Hodgson]

Scott David Daniels:

> Isn't it even worse than this?
> On Win2K & XP, don't the file systems have something to do with the
> encoding?  So D: (a FAT drive) might naturally be str, while C:
> (an NTFS drive) might naturally be unicode.  

    This is generally safe as Windows is using unicode internally and 
provides full-fidelity access to the FAT drive using unicode strings. 
You can produce failures if you try to create files with names that can 
not be represented but you would see a similar failure with byte string 
access.

 > Even worse, would be a
> path that switches in the middle (which it might do if we get to a
> ZIP file or use the newer dir-in-file file systems.

    If you are promoting from byte strings with a known encoding to 
unicode path objects then this should always work.

    Neil