[M3devel] Pathname.Legal

[Stefan Sperling]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 06:11:49AM -0500, Rodney M. Bates wrote:
> Since the language itself specifies that program variables of type
> CHAR are in ISO Latin-1, not just ASCII, I think extending compilers,
> etc., to handle those characters makes complete sense, without even
> needing to view it as support for unicode or differing locales.
>
> Do I understand correctly that Neels' patch extends just to ISO Latin-1?

More than that. The patch allows any byte-sized character
except the DirSepChar, which effectivly makes any character
encoding that uses single byte encoding legal.

So Latin-2 etc. are also included, which is a feature,
not a bug. As long as only single byte encodings are involved
this is totally fine.

So since CM3 assumes Latin-1 anyway, not handling unicode correctly
is not a problem. But users should be made aware that if they
use CM3 programs with filenames in multi-byte encodings such
as UTF-8, really strange things may happen...

CM3 should get unicode support some day... unicode is quite hairy,
I've seen quite a few UTF-8 related problems in the subversion bug
tracker. Subversion tries to use UTF-8 all the way.

The problems were along the lines of using either
	'this an a with umlaut;',
	or 'the next char has an umlaut; a;',
	or 'a; the previous char had an umlaut;'
for encoding the ä character. These are all legal UTF-8.

But: The encoding method used on a given system is up to the
filesystem implementation in the OS, i.e. hard to detect.
So in case of subversion, which does not heed all these cases (yet),
filenames with umlauts work on UNIX and Windows, but not on MacOSX.
Wheeee! :)

-- 
Stefan Sperling <stsp at elego.de>                 Software Developer
elego Software Solutions GmbH                            HRB 77719
Gustav-Meyer-Allee 25, Gebaeude 12        Tel:  +49 30 23 45 86 96 
13355 Berlin                              Fax:  +49 30 23 45 86 95
http://www.elego.de                 Geschaeftsfuehrer: Olaf Wagner
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