Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

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

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:1x1alb3nqznbn.5pnmbt638tqf$.dlg@40tude.net...
...
> Expensive than what? There is no any cheaper way to index characters of an
> UTF-8 string. It not expensive it how it is. Do you propose not to provide
> indexing characters of a UTF-8 string?

If it is strongly typed, I'd only provide storage and equality comparisons. 
No indexing, surely no slicing, and not even any ordering operators. They're 
all too expensive to implement.

>>>> Windows surely does recognize UNC names natively - surely the file open
>>>> does. So by your definition these are "true" roots. There of course is 
>>>> a lot
>>>> of crappy software out there that doesn't allow them,
>>>
>>> It is not crappy, it is backward compatible. All this software uses 
>>> *legal*
>>> Windows API, and it is the API functions (16-bit or whatever) which fail 
>>> to
>>> handle fake \\nodes, useless stuff like "My Documents", "Desktop" etc. 
>>> This
>>> rubbish has nothing to do with the file system. It could be supported, 
>>> no
>>> question, but no portable program will probably ever use it. So why 
>>> should
>>> we care?
>>
>> I have no idea what you are talking about. Every 32-bit API supports UNC
>> names, and always has (at least as far back as Windows 95).
>
> No, I think that this includes NT4, 95, 98, ME. But I am lazy to verify 
> it.

Well, that's because you *can't* verify it. My Ada programs (including our 
compiler and our version control front-end) run on all of those systems, and 
we regularly use shares directly from them. The version control *only* uses 
shares for communication, and I used it on Windows 98 for years (it 
originally was created there, I believe).

You can have issues if you have password-protected shares (since you can't 
provide the password this way), but if you provide the password another way 
(via explorer, for instance), or you use a Windows domain for security, all 
is well. (If you need passwords to be remembered, you have to use XP or 
newer; no idea why that was.) And if you don't have the password, you just 
get Use_Error as you would expect for a security-related issue. No biggie.

...
> I have nothing against it, except that Ada standard cannot mandate the way
> roots are to be enumerated under Windows. What it has to mandate is that 
> an
> ability to enumerate roots shall be provided.

I disagree with everything you wrote on this topic. And there will be a way 
to enumerate roots over my dead body, because it is not reliably 
implementable on Windows (no matter how you define the roots). Requiring Ada 
programs to handle traps would be itiotic, the result would be incompatible 
with other language runtimes, with some anti-virus, and it *still* wouldn't 
be reliable.

                                  Randy.