Adding wide support to the Ada binding?

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

I am spending a lot of time thinking about all the things I started and 
never finished this week. I spent all of 2012 learning about Ada. I 
largely failed. Ada is awesome but writing a binding for it is very 
painful. The binding are often about 1/3 of the code being bound and 
there is often a very small community using them and support for the 
binding becomes stale.

Ada is like meeting the women of your dreams only to find out that she 
has 6 weeks left to live. Everything I try to do with the language ends 
up at dead ends. I can imagine doing amazing things with it if I just 
had a library that I liked. I am thinking that with a bit of work, the 
ncurses binding might be just that.

I was playing with the ncurses Ada binding last night. It does not have 
wide character support and I would need this if I used it extensively.

How does the addition of wide support basically work in C ncurses? I 
know that with UTF-8, the first byte can be bitmasked to reveal how many 
bytes the UTF-8 "character" is composed of. Is this what ncursesw is 
based on?

Are I/O operations bitmasked and then reading and writing to the screen 
is done as 1 or more bytes rather then byte by byte?

Would it just be a matter of intercepting all I/O and applying this 
concept ?

Thanks