[racket] Reader constructor for #<path:....>

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 14:43, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:

> At Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:29:57 +0200, Laurent wrote:
> > The reader cannot read #<path:....> forms (is this the right term?).
> > When the interaction window is in constructor mode, for (build-path "a"
> > "b"), it writes #<path:a/b>, but this cannot be read back.
> >
> > First question: would it be possible to make the reader read paths?
>
> The reason that paths are not `read'able is that's there is not a
> single right choice for how to marshal paths:
>
>  * Sometimes you want the string form of a path, which may be encoded
>   in different ways on different platforms (e.g., using different
>   locales) to keep the string form the same.
>
>  * Sometimes you want the bytes form of a path, because the path isn't
>   going to be used on multiple systems, and converting to a string
>   form may lose information (e.g., because it's not a UTF-8 encoding).
>
> Since there was no right answer, we decided not to pick either of them.
> The lack of a `read'able form is a weak hint to programmers that they
> need to look closely at the question.
>

Thanks, I understand.
Maybe we could distinguish between `read'able and un`read'able paths?


>
> > Second question: I need this for my own purposes, so I wrote a
> > path-constructor:
> > (define/provide (write-path p)
> >   (cons 'build-path
> >         (map (λ(p-elt)(if (symbol? p-elt)
> >                           (list 'quote p-elt)
> >                           (path->string p-elt)))
> >              (explode-path p))))
> >
> > > (write-path (build-path 'same 'up "a" "b"))
> > '(build-path 'same 'up "a" "b")
> >
> > Does someone know if this is good enough, or am I omitting something
> > (platform specific maybe)?
>
> As a minimum, use `path-element->string' instead of `path->string'.
>
> Otherwise, beware that (as noted above) not all paths have string
> encodings; depending on your application, that may not be an issue. Or
> it may be that you want to marshal via byte strings using `bytes->path'
> as a constructor.
>

Thanks a lot Matthew!
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