[boost] Re: Re: Re: Re: Oughtn't filesystem::path acc ept the "*" and"?" wildcards?

From: Edward Diener (eddielee_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-04-23 13:25:18

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.