Re: GNAT vs UTF-8 source file names

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday, July 4, 2017 at 7:57:06 AM UTC-6, Simon Wright wrote:
> 
> It's worse than that, on macOS anyway[2].
> 
> $ GNAT_FILE_NAME_CASE_SENSITIVE=1 gnatmake -c p*.ads
> gcc -c páck3.ads
> páck3.ads:1:10: warning: file name does not match unit name, should be "páck3.ads"
> 
> The reason for this apparently-bizarre message is[3] that macOS takes 
> the composed form (lowercase a acute) and converts it under the hood 
> to what HFS+ insists on, the fully decomposed form (lowercase a, combining 
> acute); thus the names are actually different even though they _look_ 
> the same.

This is why I maintain that unicode is crap -- a mistake along the lines of C that will likely take *decades* for the rest of "the industry" / computer science to realize.

> 
> I have to say that, great as it would be to have this fixed, the changes 
> required would be extensive, and I can’t see that anyone would think it 
> worth the trouble.

One of unicode's biggest problems is that there's no longer any coherent vision -- it started off as a idea to offer one code-point per character in human language, but then shifted to glyph-building (hence combining characters), and as such lacks a unifying principle.