Re: [Caml-list] GSoC: better UTF-8 support

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

> D:\>md "Paweł Łukaszewski"
> D:\>cd "Paweł Łukaszewski"
> D:\Paweł Łukaszewski>ocaml
>        Objective Caml version 3.11.2
>
> # Sys.getcwd();;
> - : string = "D:\\Pawel Lukaszewski"

1) That's very different problem from defining new Char and String
like modules for UTF-8 encoded strings.
2) Is that a windows problems ? Here on osx :

> mkdir  Łukaszewski
> cd Łukaszewski
> rlwrap ocaml
        Objective Caml version 3.12.0

# Sys.getcwd ();;
- : string = "/private/tmp/?\129ukaszewski"
# Char.code (Sys.getcwd ()).[13];;
- : int = 197
# Char.code (Sys.getcwd ()).[14];;
- : int = 129

so we have 0xC5 0x81 for Ł which is the right UTF-8 representation for it.

I'm currently not up to date on the problem of unicode encoded
filenames in ocaml but isn't that something that should be handled by
the underlying libc ?

Note, maybe a nice addition for the gsoc project would be to add an
option to ocaml so that it doesn't escape the bytes 127 to 159 when it
prints strings allowing your UTF-8 aware tty to display UTF-8 encoded
strings correctly, not as above.

> Fully aware - but just because you need to work with strings does *not* imply you ever need even to compare them. Granted, the documentation may note that to perform a canonical comparison you'll need a third party library but I still maintain that having basic support is better and more usable than having none
[...]

But then, if you only need byte-level comparison String.compare is
fine. So I really don't see the benefits of these UTF-8 Char and
String like modules.

Best,

Daniel