Hello,
Well, my point is that if we expose that primitive to the image, we will never have the need to do it from a plugin because you can always pass a valid file name into it. It's really strange to me that the VM does translation for stuff which is (supposedly) handled in the image already. I could understand this if we would shoot for a file/directory abstraction inside the image but the way it's right now we're hiding stuff from the image that the image supposedly is responsible for (platform file name handling) and that's Just Wrong (tm).
Since Squeak3.8, FilePath class is supposed to do the conversion. I wonder if how ioFilename:fromString:ofLength:resolveAliases: interacts with FilePath...
-- Yoshiki