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

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:32:15 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> 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.

Weakly typed is what this means. Nevertheless it is the path which is
supposed to identify the content type.

> 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.)

They are not obsolete, in fact they won against Unix's flabby and
disordered attempts to offer anything useful instead. The problem is that
they are not enforced, so weak typing: you think it is a document?
Surprise, surprise! Another problem is that there should be no files at all
and how should look like the naming scheme in an OO OS, nobody cares. 

>> Does the wildcard pattern "R*"
> 
> In what RE syntax?

It is a wildcard pattern. Wildcards is the most frequently used pattern
language.

* matches any, maybe empty, sequence of characters. Sometimes ? or % is
introduced, to mach exactly one character. 

>  > 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.

How do define it properly? Does it match Latin-1's �, UTF-8's �, UTF-16's
�, UTF-32's �? Don't you get that it cannot be done without abstracting
*encoding* away?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de