Re: Exclusive file access

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Dmitry A. Kazakov:

> On Sun, 30 Aug 2015 13:35:16 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
>> * Dmitry A. Kazakov:
>> 
>>> No, I meant Wide_Wide_String.
>>>
>>> Ada's Wide_String is legally UCS-2. Windows is UTF-16. The only full
>>> Unicode string type is Wide_Wide_String. For an Indo-European language
>>> there is no difference, of course.
>> 
>> GNAT's Wide_String should be compatible with UTF-16.
>
> In the sense that Wide_String is an array of 0..2**16-1 units of the
> endianness compatible to UTF-16, yes. However the standard is silent about
> endianness and alignment (a DSP processor might deploy 32-bit units per
> unit)
>
> Semantically no. Wide_String according to RM 3.5.2 (3/3) represents a
> narrower set of Unicode than UTF-16.

I don't have a current Windows system to try this, but I think Windows
allows you to use lone surrogates in file names.  Such names are not
valid UTF-16, but valid UCS-2.  If GNAT supports UCS-2 for
Wide_String, it would actually improve Windows compatibility.

>> Wide_Wide_String definitely is not.
>
> Definitely is. Both are to represent arrays of same sets of Unicode
> characters. The representation of Wide_Wide_String is of course irrelevant
> when used to specify an external file name, right?

You can end up with non-expressible names, depending on how the
conversion to the external representation is performed.  (I.e., the
system may have file names which cannot be encoded as
Wide_Wide_String.)