Re: What about a glob standard method in Ada.Command_Line ?

[Georg Bauhaus <see.reply.to@maps.futureapps.de>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

>> Is there an OS that reflects a file's content in its path?
> 
> MS-DOS, Windows, VMS, RSX-11

(These purport to reflect the file's content in the file name
(which by habitual formalism is also a path...),
but they don't.  Just open a file named README.DOC and be
surprised that it is plain text.  Open a file ending in .AVI
and see if this gets you anywhere.  File name extensions as
file content descriptors are technically obsolete but they are
still sold as important because some MS heads think
it gives them best returns, people are used to them, everyone
can profit from what programmers find useful, they are simple,
etc.)

This is getting OT...

When you have a GNAT installation with default naming
scheme for compilation units, finding child units is
as simple as matching a regular expression---on some
systems.  When RE matching supports grouping, the possibilities
further exceed those of "content type" indicating filename
extensions.  When your log files include an ISO calendar
date in filenames, find all log files of last week without
looking at one single line in it...

This name based processing is useful in real cases,
is isn't fully portable to 8.3 filesystems, still useful,
and most flexibly handled with REs matching filenames.



> Does the wildcard pattern "R*"

In what RE syntax?  Does it have to be another syntax
embedded in String or can we do better?  GNAT's SPITBOL
demonstrates: Integrate Strings.Maps etc. with the type
system and establish a well defined pattern type.


 > match "readme"? Does it match "R�cken", when
> � is (16#c3#, 16#bc#) (UTF-8)?

When the Pattern_Type is properly defined, there are no questions.


> Naive string patterns will never work.

Simple filename patterns do work, now, unless you want them to
replace operating systems, application configuration, program
porting, adapting a program to a given environment, etc...



Georg