RE: Win32 *W functions and old -C behavior

Oleg writes:
> 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).
[...]

This has already been discussed some time ago:

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/perl-unicode/2004-02/msg00016.html

Please read the whole thread to see why the code was first disabled
and then removed, and why it is a big task to make Perl work properly
with Unicode filenames (not just on Windows, on all platforms).

Here is a message that shows how you can open a file whose
name can only be represented in Unicode:

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/perl-unicode/2005-02/msg00010.html

Cheers,
-Jan