Re: Interpretation of extensions different from Unix/Linux?

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

On Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:45:33 -0700, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:

> Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>> On Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:18:08 -0700, Jeffrey R. Carter wrote:
>> 
>>> vlc wrote:
>>>> I just noticed that I have to take care when processing file names /
>>>> extensions as the creators of Ada seem to disagree with the UNIX /
>>>> Linux guys about the composition of a file name.
>>> Ada is OS independent, and tries to be OS neutral.
>> 
>> But Ada.Directories does not.
>> 
>>> It's if you assume otherwise 
>>> that you'll cause yourself trouble.
>> 
>> One have to assume otherwise when using Ada.Directories, which
>> unfortunately was not designed OS-agnostic.
> 
> I disagree. While Ada.Directories is limited to OSes with file systems, it tries 
> to be neutral towards such OSes.

I don't see how it was tried:

1. It assumes Latin-1 encoding of the file paths
2. It assumes singe root of the file system
3. Even so it provides no way to get the name of the root
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.)
5. It totally ignores devices, file versions, mount points, URL, URI
6. It does not eliminate OS-specific pseudo names, e.g "." and ".."
7. It does not provide any means to compare and canonize file names in an
OS-independent way

A trivial test is to write a portable program that prints names of all
files. With Ada.Directories it is impossible to do.

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