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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Subject: Re: [ranting] Take Command Plugin, Win32Ada and Ada.Directories
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Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:08:17 +0100
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On Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:38:32 +0100, Martin Krischik wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
>>> Not just Ada.Directories - any package where a file name is needed.
>>> And not just Win32 - any platform which supports UTF-8 file names.
>> 
>> Sure.
>> 
>> One formal problem is that Character is specified as Latin-1.
> 
> Sure - but then there is allways the BOM [1] 16#EFBBBF# would mark the
> string UTF-8. But I guess it would be an enormous effort to support two
> file name string types - one Latin-1 and another UTF-8 - and to find out
> which one you got you need the check the first 3 characters.

I would just drop Latin-1 and return back to 7-bit ASCII, requiring that
all Strings passed to or received from outside were UTF-8. For legacy
programs Latin-1 versions of Ada.Text_IO and Ada.Directories could be
provided as Ada.Latin_1.Text_IO etc.

(There is an issue with literals like '�'. I would make them all
Wide_Character only and provide built-in conversions from Wide to String.
Clearly all string types are convertible subtypes of some Universal_String
with unlimited-length characters.)

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