Re: UTF-8 in strings - a bug?

["Björn Persson" <spam-away@nowhere.nil>]

Robert I. Eachus wrote:

> Hmmmm...  The technical answer is that GNAT is not validated on Fedora 
> with UTF-8.  The practical answer is that with GNAT, you should compile 
> using the UTF-8 non-standard mode, if you are using UTF-8.
> 
> But what if you want to validate on Fedora in UTF-8 mode?  Then you will 
> have to modify the libraries to get this "right."

A library bug it is then. I don't necessarily want to *validate* in 
UTF-8 mode, but now that Mr. Krischik has been so kind to invite my 
parameter handler to AdaCL, I want it to *work* in a multilingual world. 
(It's not just Fedora of course. I expect this to happen in all modern 
Unixoid OSes, and maybe Windows too.)

Recompiling is not a workable solution. The encoding isn't known until 
run time. Software is frequently distributed in precompiled form you 
know, and the users may use many different encodings. It might even be 
that different users on the same system use different encodings. So I 
guess a transcoding library will have to be wrapped around 
Ada.Command_Line, and probably around Ada.Command_Line.Environment and 
the standard input, output and error files too.

Or could it be possible to get a function Argument(Number : in Positive) 
return Wide_Wide_String into Ada 2005?

(Besides I couldn't see that "-gnatiw -gnatW8" made any difference. 
Perhaps they're only for ACT-Gnat? But it doesn't really matter to me.)

-- 
Björn Persson

jor ers @sv ge.
b n_p son eri nu