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[Python-Dev] Pathlib enhancments - method name only

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Sun Apr 10 11:03:27 EDT 2016 
On Sun, 10 Apr 2016 18:51:23 +1200, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> > On 9 April 2016 at 23:02, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> > 
> >>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.
> 
> The term "pathname" is what is conventionally used to refer
> to a textual string passed to the OS to identify an object
> in the file system.
> 
> It's often abbreviated to just "path", but that's ambiguous
> for our purposes, because "path" can also refer to one of
> our higher-level objects.

I find it interesting that in all my years of unix computing I've never
run into this (at least so that I became concious of it).  I see now
that in fact the Posix spec uses 'pathname'.

Objection, such as it was, completely withdrawn :)

(Nick's point about Path object vs path is also a good one.)

--David
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