Adding System.FilePath

[Sven Panne]

On Friday 16 March 2007 15:10, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> I'm not clear on exactly what you're proposing: would
>
>     getDirectoryContents "." >>= mapM_ removeFile
>
> remove all the files in ".", regardless of what my locale is, my OS is,
> etc? i.e. would this solve my problem in
>
>     http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2005-July/004189.html

OK, let's make this a bit more concrete and let's take Mac OS X as an example. 
On this platform, peekCString would decode from UTF-8 to Unicode (probably 
normalizing the Unicode string on the way), so no information is lost. OTOH, 
withCString would encode the Unicode string to UTF-8 (decomposing on the way? 
Wolfgang?).  Both functions are used by getDirectoryContents internally, so 
this will be "Unicode-enabled" then, too. The main point here is that UTF-8 
=> Unicode => UTF-8 is lossless, and the same holds for my proposed change 
for *nices, too, as long as the local encoding is invertible in this sense. I 
am not sure if there are encodings in use out there which do not have this 
property, but even if they are: All e.g. Qt-based programs would share the 
same problems.

For Windows platforms we should use the "wide" API internally, and the CString 
functions would be equivalent to their CWString counterparts. For older 
Windows versions we could fall back to "current ANSI code page", if we want 
to support those still.

Of course this means that we e.g. can't use a single __hscore_open anymore (or 
we'll have to do some more cpp trickery to get the char vs. wchar_t problem 
right), but I think that the effort is manageable and can be done in a 
piecewise fashion.

Cheers,
   S.