Quoth rowaasr13(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com ("Oleg V. Volkov"):
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.
This question would be better directed at p5p
(per5-porters(_at_)perl(_dot_)org),
as they are the people who maintain perl (and who made this decision).
AFAIK, they weren't aware that anyone used this switch.
Ben
--
Every twenty-four hours about 34k children die from the effects of poverty.
Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that 2800 people died on 9/11, so it's like
that image, that ghastly, grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated
twelve times every day. Full of children. [Iain Banks]
benmorrow(_at_)tiscali(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk
