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From: "Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Community Input for the Maintenance and Revision of the Ada
 Programming Language
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 19:49:25 -0500
Organization: JSA Research & Innovation
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Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:47845
Date: 2017-08-30T19:49:25-05:00
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"Robert Eachus" <rieachus@comcast.net> wrote in message 
news:725b229b-f768-4603-b564-4751e5e7136f@googlegroups.com...
On Friday, August 11, 2017 at 5:13:44 PM UTC-4, Randy Brukardt wrote:

>> The problem is that AdaCore's desire to keep this misfeature killed the
>> first attempt to allow UTF-8 in file names generally. There needs to be 
>> some
>> way to tell UTF-8 strings from Latin-1 strings (as characters over 128 
>> are
>> encoded differently); I believe there was a suggestion to use a BOM to do
>> this. That would have broken the "free" use in Linux, and it was killed. 
>> So
>> you guys got nothing.

>There is an 'elegant' solution.  Add a UTF8 character string type.

Possible, but in no way elegant: you'd still need duplicate operations for 
it all over the runtime library. (I.e. UTF8_Open, UTF8_Name, etc.). Can't 
change the existing routines without nasty compability problems. (Note that 
auto-conversions don't work either, as they'd make almost all existing code 
with string literals ambiguous.)

The other operations exist already, of course, in the 
Ada.Strings.UTF_Encodings packages. They don't help for uses like I/O and 
Exception_Information.

                                Randy.