Re: Why no Ada.Wide_Directories?

[Michael Rohan <michael@zanyblue.com>]

Hi,

There seems to be two major issues being considered here

* The handling of "string" data with within Ada applications, i.e., should String be opaque with, perhaps, class type interfaces giving views into this data as Latin-1, UTF8, UCS-2, etc.

* The more immediate issue I raised initially, what to do when you have a Wide_String and want to use it as a file name.  I'm currently just converting such names to UTF8 which works well on Linux but probably will have issue on Windows if I were to use non-Latin-1 type strings.

While the first issue is relatively involved, the second issue could be handled by the run-time (with the possibilities of exceptions if the name could not be mapped, but that would be up to the application to handle).

My initial question suggested there should be Wide_* versions of the packages that interface with the OS (Directories, Command_Line, Environment_Variables, etc).  Having implemented wrappers for these it seems to me extending the existing packages to have additional routines for Wide_String/Wide_Wide_String would be cleaner.

This extension of the existing packages would be something that might be possible to consider for the next revision (but maybe too late?).

Take care,
Michael.