Re: [pygame] Building paths & pygame.image.load documentation

[Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Irv Kalb wrote:
> I started working in that environment in the days of Mac 
> OS9.  At that time, the Mac folder separator character was the ":" colon 
> character.

Yes, in those days it was vitally necessary to use the os.path
functions for cross-platform code.

VMS is another example of a system which had wildly different
pathname syntax.

We're fortunate right now that the three major platforms have
partially-compatible pathnames. Whether that will continue
in the future is impossible to tell.

> I didn't realize it but the character on a Mac is now the 
> "/", same as the Unix character - probably changed when OS X came out. 

Yes, MacOSX is essentially Unix in many ways.

>  I think either one will work on a Mac.

If mean either "/" or ":", no, that's not true -- ":" is just
an ordinary filename character in MacOSX, same as Unix.

But, if you create a filename containng ":", the Finder displays
it as a "/" -- suggesting there's still something in there
somewhere that works with Classic MacOS style pathnames!

> When I started using Python, I thought it was very clever that I can use 
> just the "/" character in Python, and Python seems to do whatever 
> translation it needs to do to make the path work on the target system.

Which is an illusion caused by some degree of conversion in
the major platforms.

--
Greg