Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:hxhovb1olmcc.wemymiiulni8$.dlg@40tude.net...
...
> 1. It assumes Latin-1 encoding of the file paths

True,

> 2. It assumes singe root of the file system

Surely not true; it's not true for Windows, for instance, where there are 
pretty much an infinite number of possible roots.

> 3. Even so it provides no way to get the name of the root

I've got an action item to fix this and a number of other problems. Not very 
pressing, though.

> 4. It assumes that directory name can be composed from simple names
> (Compose is broken for the systems where the syntax of a directory name
> differs from the name of a plain file.)

True. We couldn't find any such systems, so we didn't worry about it. (Note 
that Compose can rearrange text if need be; that's enough to handle VMS, for 
one example.)

> 5. It totally ignores devices, file versions, mount points, URL, URI

Not quite true (that's the meaning of "special file"), but it surely doesn't 
try to do anything with such things. There is no real commonality between 
them for the different OSes, so there isn't much point in abstracting them.

> 6. It does not eliminate OS-specific pseudo names, e.g "." and ".."

Those are real names on every OS that I've tried. So it doesn't make sense 
to eliminate them.

> 7. It does not provide any means to compare and canonize file names in an
> OS-independent way

This is not possible to do in general (there is a long Windows developer 
article on such things - the conclusion is to design your programs so that 
you never try to compare file names). I've found that out the hard way -- a 
few functions in Janus/Ada depend on normalization of file names, and they 
fail in unusual ways periodically (usually getting confused between long and 
short versions of names). It's definitely not possible to do it on Windows 
in a bullet-proof fashion, so it would be a bad idea to require Ada 
compilers to do so!

                              Randy.