Re: Why no Ada.Wide_Directories?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Oct 17, 7:32 pm, ytomino <aghi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not confused. Your misreading.

I think we have a terminology problem.  To me, Latin-1 is a set of
characters (a subset of the full Unicode character set).  So I get
confused when people talk about Latin-1 versus UTF-8 strings as if
they were mutually exclusive.  They're not, the way I understand the
terms.  You can have a string composed of Latin-1 characters that's
represented using UTF-8 encoding; and the bits in that string would be
different from a string of the same Latin-1 characters using the
"regular" encoding, if any character in the string is in the 16#80#..
16#FF# range.

However, everyone else seems to be using "Latin-1" to talk about the
*representation* in addition to the subset of characters that's being
represented---in particular, the representation in which each symbol
is represented as one 8-bit byte.  And I guess we don't really have a
good term to describe that representation.  I think UCS-1 is best, but
it doesn't seem to be commonly used.  So I guess I'll have to learn to
live with the misuse of the term "Latin-1" to refer to a
representation (encoding)---just as we older programmers have learned
to live with the terms "Julian Date" and "Gregorian Date" to mean a
dates in year/day-of-year form and in year/month/day form despite the
fact that this has nothing to do with the Julian or Gregorian
calendar.  OK, then.  I apologize for assuming that this was a sign of
your misunderstanding.

On the other hand, I was confused by your statement
"Ada.Character.Handling.To_Upper breaks UTF-8".  I don't even see a
way for this to make sense.  Ada.Characters.Handling works on
character types, and a character type is an enumeration type; but a
UTF-8 "character" can't be an enumeration type at all, since it's a
variable-length sequence of 8-bit bytes.  I'm not quite sure what you
meant here.

As to having utilities such as versions of Ada.Strings.Unbounded or
Ada.Strings.Fixed that work directly on UTF-8-encoded strings (and
versions of Ada.Characters that operate on single UTF-8-encoded
characters): it's certainly possible to write a package like that, and
anyone is free to do so, but I just don't think they'd be widely used
enough to add to the Standard.  I could be wrong.

                            -- Adam