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[Python-Dev] Pathlib enhancments - method name only

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Sat Apr 9 09:02:04 EDT 2016 
On Sat, 09 Apr 2016 17:48:38 +1000, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9 April 2016 at 04:25, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 8 Apr 2016 at 11:13 Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> >> On 04/08/2016 10:46 AM, Koos Zevenhoven wrote:
> >>  > On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 7:42 PM, Chris Barker  wrote:
> >>  >> On Fri, Apr 8, 2016 at 9:02 AM, Koos Zevenhoven wrote:
> >>
> >>  >>> I'm still thinking a little bit about 'pathname', which to me sounds
> >>  >>> more like a string than fspath does.
> >>  >>
> >>  >>
> >>  >> I like that a lot - or even "__pathstr__" or "__pathstring__"
> >>  >> after all, we're making a big deal out of the fact that a path is
> >>  >> *not a string*, but rather a string is a *representation* (or
> >>  >> serialization) of a path.
> >>
> >> That's a decent point.
> >>
> >> So the plausible choices are, I think:
> >>
> >> - __fspath__  # File System Path -- possible confusion with Path
> >
> > +1
> 
> I like __fspath__, but I'm also sympathetic to Koos' point that we're
> really dealing with path *names* being produced via this protocol,
> rather than the paths themselves.
> 
> That would bring the completely explicit "__fspathname__" into the
> mix, which would be comparable in length to "__getattribute__" as a
> magic method name (both in terms of number of syllable and number of
> characters).

I'm not going to vote -1, but for the record I have no real intuition
as to what a "path name" would be.  An arbitrary identifier that we're
using to refer to an os path?

That is, a 'filename' is the identifier we've assigned to this thing
pointed to by an inode in linux, but an os path is a text representation
of the path from the root filename to a specified filename.  That is,
the path *is* the name, so to say "path name" sounds redundant and
confusing to me.

--David
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