Beman Dawes wrote:
At 02:26 PM 11/12/2004, Peter Dimov wrote:
We have two OSes in use today. Windows, which takes either path or wpath, and POSIX et al, which takes only a path. If the user wants to use something that is neither a path or a wpath, he must convert it to one of those.
Yes. Or more exactly, to "native_path_string_type" which is an implementation defined typedef, AFAWK, always to std:string or std::wstring.
I'm not sure that this is the right way to handle "dual" OSes, such as Windows NT. On Windows NT both string types are "native" from the API point of view. The library should not attempt to convert the path supplied from the user! This may or may not produce the desired results. The OS must be trusted to do the necessary conversion (it knows whether the filesystem on which the path resides stores narrow or wide names, and how to convert between them in this particular context). "Single" OSes that only support... well, a single string type, will obviously need help from the library. :-)