Ruby Pathname Moved to Core, Documentation Upgraded

In release 4.0, the Ruby Powers-That-Be have integrated the Pathname class into the Ruby core. This enhancement is a Very Good Thing as Pathname offers a consistent and convenient interface to numerous methods in other classes and modules. It wraps almost all methods in class File and module FileTest, and some methods in class Dir and module FileUtils.

Using Pathname instead of these alternatives eliminates the need to know which class or module has which methods and reduces the need to repeatedly type the class name and path variable. However, existing documentation for many Pathname methods only links to another method in another class, often with little to no local examples.

The documentation for Pathname has been significantly upgraded by the author, providing a Pathname-local description and example for each method. This rewrite eliminates the practice of linking to a similar or underlying method elsewhere. Additionally, the documentation for the Pathname class itself has been revised, and a "What's Here" section has been added.

The updated documentation can be found in Ruby master and will be released with Ruby 4.1 later this year. The author expresses hope that these improvements will make Pathnames even more user-friendly!