Greetings. Once upon a time using -C on Win32 made Perl use *W functions, but after several versions it was removed, causing all kind of headache to people who used it in their programs and hoped that they won't have problems any longer with accessing filenames written in different scripts. Right now I'm writing a module that have to do all kind of unperlish stuff like direct access to memory, pointer arithmetics and API calls to have such functionality back and I often wonder just why it was removed without any alternative way to ask Perl to use native calls (since all *A calls on any NT system is just wrappers around *W).
Recently I've also stumbled on interesting passage in perlrun: --->>>--- In Perls earlier than 5.8.1 the -C switch was a Win32-only switch that enabled the use of Unicode-aware "wide system call" Win32 APIs. This feature was practically unused, however, and the command line switch was therefore "recycled".) ---<<<--- Can somebody explain, where that strange assumption of "practically unused" comes from? From somebody, who never seen anything but ASCII on his FS? Not to mention that considering all Windows documentation that encourages to use only *W functions for a long time already, behavior once provided by -C switch should actually be default on Win32. -- Oleg "Rowaa[SR13]" V. Volkov
