std::path::Path does not implement Show

[wycats]

A Show implementation could use the string representation.

[alexcrichton]

Closing as working as intended.

This was done in an attempt to make let path: ~str = format!("{}", path) difficult to emphasize that paths are not strings. Paths can be displayed as strings (with utf-8 replacement characters) with this code:

let p: Path = ...;
println!("{}", p.display());

[wycats]

I really think we should consider converting some of these cases (especially in paths) into UTF-8, instead of treating them as binary and therefore unrepresentable as Rust strings.

As far as I know, the main case of lossy round-tripping through Unicode is in SHIFT-JIS, and I don't even know if that lossy scenario affects real-world paths that happen to be encoded in SHIFT-JIS (the lossiness is because a MS extension created duplicates of conceptually the same character, which were then unified in Unicode. I don't know if that problem will end up mattering for paths).

[thestinger]

Paths aren't Unicode though. Most *nix filesystems allow any bytes other than / and \0. NTFS allows any UCS2, even if it's invalid UTF-16.

[huonw]

(e.g. touch $(echo -e '\xFF') creates an invalid-UTF8 filename on linux.)

[thestinger]

@huonw: depends on the file system if it's valid of course :)