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Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:12:39 -0400
From: "Peter C. Chapin" <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>
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Subject: Re: Why no Ada.Wide_Directories?
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Date: 2011-10-15T09:12:39-04:00
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On 2011-10-15 04:38, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> There are two problems with the standard:
>
> 1. It does not define strings and characters in terms of a code point type
> to be consistent with Unicode;
>
> 2. It does not provide automatic conversions between character/string
> types, because of the problem #1, and because the Ada type system is too
> weak for that.
>
> Clearly file operations, directory operations, character maps should be
> defined using code points rather than characters. There should be only one
> instance of each operation/package independent on the encoding and the
> combinations of encodings.

Disclaimer: I haven't thought about this very much.

It seems like you are expecting too much from the standard. If a 
standard program writes files with names that the standard understands 
then a standard program can read those files back and manipulate them 
via Ada.Directories. Yes?

The problem arises when you try to ask a standard program to delve into 
system specific details such as reading arbitrary ("exotic") file names 
supported by the system. That doesn't work, but I wouldn't expect it to 
work so what's the problem?

C avoids this complexity by just not including directory manipulation in 
the standard at all. Ada at least allows a standard program to 
manipulate directories containing files written by another standard program.

I can understand that it might be nice to extend the standard to include 
proper support for Unicode file names and such. But I don't think the 
lack of that support can be interpreted as some kind of failure of the 
standard.

Peter