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From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Why no Ada.Wide_Directories?
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:38:23 +0200
Organization: cbb software GmbH
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Date: 2011-10-15T10:38:23+02:00
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On Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:06:05 -0700 (PDT), ytomino wrote:

> In RM 3.5.2, Ada's Character/String types are not UTF-8 but Latin-1
> (except Ada.Strings.UTF_Encoding).
> I'm afraid that is violation of the standard even if the
> implementation accepts UTF-8.

The same applies to Wide_String, which is UCS-2 not UTF-16. Implementations
pretending otherwise are wrong. For that matter Windows xW calls are
UTF-16. Passing Wide_String there is wrong.

> Of course, I think that the standard is impractical, too.

There are two problems with the standard:

1. It does not define strings and characters in terms of a code point type
to be consistent with Unicode;

2. It does not provide automatic conversions between character/string
types, because of the problem #1, and because the Ada type system is too
weak for that.

Clearly file operations, directory operations, character maps should be
defined using code points rather than characters. There should be only one
instance of each operation/package independent on the encoding and the
combinations of encodings.

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