I have the follwoing subject to submit (plus a question)

See the three entries below taken from the Mathematica V11 help system

 AbsoluteFileName[“name”]

"gives the full absolute version of the name for a file in your filesystem."

ExpandFileName["name"]

"textually expands name to have the form of an absolute file name for your operating system"

File[“path”]

"is a symbolic representation of a location in the local file system".

$RootDirectory

"Gives the root directory of the file system"

Additionally, please

See the “Implementations” section in the Wiki page below

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileURIscheme"

And see what Microsoft says here about Windows Local File Systems (my OS).

“https://msdn.microsoft.com/es-es/library/windows/desktop/aa364407(v=vs.85).aspx”

Now, for Wolfram (or whoever wanted to respond), I have the following question:

are equivalent the references below?

or,

do they refer to the same file system?

• "in your filesystem", (in AbsoluteFileName[“name”])

• "for your operating system" (in ExpandFileName["name"])

• "in the local file system" (in File[“path”])

• "the file system" (in $RootDirectory)

1. If the answer is YES, probably the language in the documentation should be unified.
2. If the answer is NOT, probably the eventual conflicting terminology would need some centralized explanation of the differences.

Note that there are functions/commands (and others) in Mathematica that use the term “Local” , as in LocalObjects, LocalSymbol, $LocalBase, and others, which, I assume that strictly speaking, have nothing to do with the term “Local” when it is referring to file systems. Or, probably, I am missing something

Maybe, Wolfram can argues that the meaning of all that is clear from the context, but I think that nothing should be taken for granted if not explicitly stated.

In any case, whether or not it can be interpreted in the context, the eventual clarification conveys an unnecessary waste of valuable time.