From: Neal Tucker <ntucker@vax.area.com>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 06:35:20 -0700

Re: / vs \ [Re: PenguinPlay IRC meeting. GGI developers wanted]

becka@rz.uni-duesseldorf.de wrote:

> >     * A general file I/O system.  Provides functinality similar to the
> > GNU coustom streams or C++ stdstream, only
> >         portably and in C.  (Specifically we want this to allow loading
> > from "archive files").
> 
> Yeah - and "file-dialogs" and separators and such should be abstracted ...
> You know that DOS \ vs Unix / thing ...

An approach I have used for this in the past, which worked very well,
was to represent paths as URL's as much as possible.  You need some
simple utilities to convert a path to and from a URL based on your
platform, but it's really convenient that the path separators and
allowed chars are really well defined for URL's, and URL's are used on
all platforms.

I started using this when working on a cross-platform mac/windows
program which I wanted to be portable to UNIX too, and found myself
trying to juggle 1) Path separators (\, /, and :), 2) volume identifiers
( "c:/path/path" vs "volume:path:path" vs nothing), and 3) conventions
for indicating whether a path is relative or absolute (on the mac, a
path is relative if you *include* a path separator at the beginning...
i.e. :dir:dir2:file is a relative path...go figure).  It turns out
it all boils down to one easy set of rules if you use URL's.

-Neal Tucker