Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:33:40 -0500, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
> news:b4dn28zky4qe$.mrr68avem08a$.dlg@40tude.net...
> ...
>> Surprising is that Ada.Directories uses plain String for file names, paths,
>> extension and patterns. This is clearly not an "Ada way" to deal with such
>> things.
> 
> Why is that surprising? It has to be compatible with the file names accepted 
> by the various Open routines in Ada.Text_IO, Ada.Direct_IO, etc.
>
> You could argue that String is the wrong choice for all of those things, and 
> I think you'd be right, but it's irrelevant as we stuck with the Ada 83 
> definitions of the file I/O routines. (Adding overloaded ones would be 
> unacceptibly incompatible, you wouldn't be able to use literals.)

No, I don't see any problem here. There is no literals for private types,
(unfortunately). But if the type Fully_Qualified_File_Name (or whatever we
called it) should have literals, they would be record aggregates. So we
would write something like:

   File : File_Type;
begin
   Open
   (  File => File,
      Mode => In_File,
      Name =>
      (  Volume => "C:",
         Directory => ("Documents and Settings", "me", "work"),
         Name => "test",
         Extension => "txt"
   )  );

the above is impossible due to language limitations, but we could:

   File : File_Type;
begin
   Open
   (  File => File,
      Mode => In_File,
      Volume => "C:",
      Directory => ("Documents and Settings", "me", "work"),
      Name => "test",
      Extension => "txt"
   );

or / and

   File : File_Type;
begin
   Open
   (  File => File,
      Mode => In_File,
      Name =>
      Name
      (  Volume => "C:",
         Directory => ("Documents and Settings", "me", "work"),
         Name => "test",
         Extension => "txt"
   )  );

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de