Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info>:

> But if I could borrow Guido's time machine, I'd go back and convince
> the file system people to use ^ as the record separator, rather than
> slash or backslash or colon. Caret is *much* less likely to be useful
> in file names than forward slash (often used for dates) or colon, or
> even backslash.

You are stuck with the axiom that pathname and its representation are
one and the same thing.

URI's make the distinction clear. Say you wanted to express a resource

   päätyö/2

as part of a URI. URIs are to contain a subset of ASCII only so an
encoding scheme has been devised. That resource is expressed like this:

   p%c3%a4%c3%a4ty%c3%b6%2f2

A far more convenient escaping scheme could have been devised for
pathnames.


Marko