Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

[Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net>]

Le 15/08/2009 10:10, Dmitry A. Kazakov a �crit :
> Shudder, it is C in Ada. Everything is a String... I am using this solution
> for years in my strings edit library. It is inherently unsafe. UTF-8 string
> must be a separate from String type.

I have sympathy with Dmitry. As one who have worked on the UTF-8 support 
for GNAT on Windows I can tell you that it is pure mess to get something 
working fine. The harder part is to ensure that no multiple conversions 
are done.

Now I'm not sure UTF-8 is what should be supported anyway. Windows offer 
either the plain ASCII (A suffix) or wide (W suffix) version of all 
services dealing with file names. So for the Windows case it would be 
far more efficient to have OS services based on Wide_String (an 
Ada.Wide_Directories for example).

What seems wrong to me is that we have Wide_Text_IO but file names are 
plain string! I don't see why this is so, it would have been better to 
use a Wide_String. Given that Wide_Text_IO is recent I think it would 
even be good to "fix" that in the next release. I understand that 
Wide_Text_IO is dealing with Wide_Character in the content of the 
file... but it would even be better to also handle name of the file as 
Wide_String. It is always possible to convert between string and 
wide_string anyway.

I may be missing something... but as an implementor and user I find this 
just broken.

Pascal.

-- 

--|------------------------------------------------------
--| Pascal Obry                           Team-Ada Member
--| 45, rue Gabriel Peri - 78114 Magny Les Hameaux FRANCE
--|------------------------------------------------------
--|    http://www.obry.net  -  http://v2p.fr.eu.org
--| "The best way to travel is by means of imagination"
--|
--| gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key F949BD3B