Niall Douglas:
> Anyway the point that I am making here is that the kernel and filesystem
> are black boxes. Unknowable. There is no point attempting to replicate
> an unknowable black box in C++. Far better to simply ask the black box
> to do the path comparison for you, it and only it knows what paths are
> equal, and which are not.

I'm thinking of abstraction where there is a virtual function call
overhead but not a syscall overhead for every comparison and where there
is still possible to compare paths to nonexistent files even when the
actual comparison algorithm is implementation defined.