Beman Dawes wrote: > At 09:03 PM 4/21/2003, Edward Diener wrote: > > >Beman Dawes wrote: > > I do > >not believe that C++ should attempt to legislate what wide > characters go >into a wide character file name as different locales > will have their own >idea of what constitutes a valid wide character > name. > > Operating system and program interoperability requirements drive the > character validity, encoding, and conversion specifications. That > doesn't leave much room for either the C++ standard or user supplied > specifications. For example, if an operating system function rejects > a > path as being invalid, there is nothing either the C++ standard or > the user can do about it.
All the more reason to allow wide character file names to be implementation and OS dependent and not attempt to legislate what a wide character file name is, other than a serquence of wide characters. Current C++ standard says practically nothing about what the characters of a narrow character filename should be in the ifstream and ofstream classes. That doesn't mean I am against your attempt to include wide character filenames in your filesystem library, only that the decision as to what are legitimate wchar_t s should be as wide as possible ( pardon the pun ). > > > Neverthless I am > >willing to be wrong about this as long as the C++ standards commitee > >realizes that it is important to add to the C++ standard library > wide >character filename support of some kind, so that cultures > whose normal >language encoding is a wide character one can use the > C++ standard > library > >to specify wide character names for their I/O functionality on OSs > which >support wide character filenames. > > Remember that the C++ committee includes active long-time members from > Japan, and that as one of the ten or twelve voting delegations to the > WG21 ISO portion of the committee, their views carry a great deal of > weight. > Even if everyone else is asleep, the Japanese delegation will politely > remind us of the importance of internationalization, and particularly > character-width, issues. I am happy to hear about that, the work you and others are doing to bring wide character filenames to C++, and the work you are doing to bring it to the filesystem library. When I argued about this on comp.std.c++ I got the distinct impression, from people such as Mr. Plauger and Mr. Kanze, that the C++ committee was trying its best not to feel it necessary to add wide characters filenames to the C++ standard library functionality. I felt, and feel, this is a mistake. Bringing in the entire international community, and making it possible that the C++ standard library will support their character sets, is of utmost importance for the health and growth of the language. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost
