Re: Filenames in Ada

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Martin Krischik" <krischik@users.sourceforge.net> wrote in message
news:1653090.31FM62oI6I@linux1.krischik.com...
...
> How does one deal with modern (utf-8) filenames in Ada?

We talked about this briefly at a recent meeting. We decided it was too late
to design a proper solution, and virtually all operating systems have a way
to deal with this anyway. (That is that they take UTF-8 names). There's no
conceptual problem with putting UTF-8 into a value of type String, and as
someone else showed, that's typcially supported by Ada implementations.

A bigger problem is that Ada (any flavor) has no built-in support for UTF-8.
I think this is a mistake, but I didn't find much support for adding any
packages. It's insane to use Wide_Wide_String to store any significant
amount of text, as it would waste nearly 3/4s of the space in typical use,
so you'd have to use something else (like UTF-8) for storage anyway.

Since filenames are implementation-defined anyway, there isn't a whole lot
of value to standardizing how they're written. So, it's just up to your
implementer to do something appropriate.

                    Randy Brukardt.