CWString API

[Simon Marlow]

On 30 November 2004 09:35, John Meacham wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 12:41:04AM -0800, Krasimir Angelov wrote:
>>    Hello guys,
>> 
>> I am working on updated version of HDirect and now I
>> am going to use CWString API to marshal (wchar_t *)
>> type to String. I found some inconsistencies in the API.
>>   - castCWcharToChar and castCharToCWchar functions
>> are defined only for Posix systems and they aren't
>> exported. In the same time castCCharToChar and
>> castCharToCChar have the same meaning and they are
>> defined and exported on all platforms.
> 
> The problem is that these operations are very unsafe, there is no
> guarenteed isomorphism or even injection between wchar_ts and Chars.
> If people really know what they are doing, they can do the conversion
> themselves via fromIntegral/ord/chr, but I don't think we should
> encourage such unsafe usage with functions when it is simple for the
> user to work around it themselves.

That's right - castCWcharToChar and its dual are unlikely to be correct
on Windows, where wchar_t is UTF-16.

However, AFAICS the whole Windows API works in terms of UTF-16, only
dealing with surrogate pairs in the text output routines.  So it might
sometimes be more convenient and efficient, but not strictly speaking
correct, to do no conversion between a UTF-16 value and Haskell's Char
in the FFI on Windows.  I think we want to provide an interface that
lets you do this if you know what you're doing.

Cheers,
	Simon