And just for info, in case anyone is considering what to do to improve
the foetid pile of dingo feces currently comprising FileDirectory,
here is the Acorn equivalents. Nice to have the Windows ones as well:-

"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> is claimed by the authorities
to have written:

> Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> asked:
> 	What should the equivalent be for the following Unix path conventions:
> 	
> 	/aVolume/anAbsolute/path
> 		is this "aVolume:anAbsolute:path" ?
ADFS::TheDiscName.$.anAbsolute.path
NB ADFS is the filing system name and currently I know of
ADFS, NFS, IDEFS, raFS, RAMFS, DOSFS, SCSIFS, ResourceFS, PipeFS,  and
even kbfFS (yes, the keyboard can be treated as a filesystem. Wierd,
huh). The first $: ends the filingsystem name, the second $: starts the
disc specification - which can be a number or a name. Getting confused
yet? I am. Oh, the $$ is almost redundant and since I use the OS
canonicalize call every timea path gets passed to the system it gets
added automagically.
> 
> Yes.
> 	aRelativePath/somewhere (a/k/a ./aRelativePath/somewhere)
> 		is this ":aRelativePath/somewhere"?
aRelativePath.somewhere
> 
> No, it's
> 	:aRelativePath:somewhere
> 
> 
> 	../some/path/relative/to/the/parent
> 		is this "::some:path:relative:to:the:parent"?
^.some.path.relative.to.the.parent
> 
> Yes.
> 	../../some/other relative path
> 		is this ":::some:other relative path"?
> 	
> About here my MacOS knowledge runs out, but I think the answer is Yes.
> 
> 	So how do I test whether a path is relative or absolute? Obviously I 
> 	can check against subdirectories (presumably volumes) under the root, 
> 	but will this work in all cases? 
> 	
> If a path begins with a colon, it is relative.
> Otherwise,
>   If it contains a colon anywhere, it is absolute and the first component
>   is the volume name.
>   Otherwise,
>     It is relative.
If the path has a colon near the beginning (ought to be more precise
really) then it must be absolute.

One thing I'd like to see is the splitName:to: being overridable.
Currently it is always called via FileDirectory blahblah and so any
platform specific version wil be ignored.

Oh and a prim to explicitly get the canonicalized path would probably be
beneficial as well.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: DC: Divide and Conquer