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From: "Adam Beneschan" <adam@irvine.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Usage of \ in Ada
Date: 23 Aug 2006 17:22:41 -0700
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Date: 2006-08-23T17:22:41-07:00
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Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> What I meant is a rationale behind the choice made to reference some code
> positions as potentially illegal. I don't understand the reason why,
> provided that the source representation is explicitly stated as irrelevant.
> As an example, I gave a program in HTML or XML encoding, which
> representation allows to place *any* code position into a string literal.
> According to ARM this program could be illegal, without obvious reason.

It's probably to prevent stupid errors.  If you have a string literal
with an LF in it, it's far more likely (using a fairly traditional
representation of the source) that you've forgotten a closing quote
than that you intended to put a linefeed in the literal.  And if the
language did try to allow a line separator in a string literal (even if
it were represented as something like \n in the representation), it
would have to change the definition of what constitutes a "line" since
some line separators would not really be line separators, and IMHO
things would get pretty muddled.  I don't know if there's any
particular rationale for not allowing other control characters, except
that doing so would probably reduce portability (e.g. try to port a
source program with character'val(26) in a string literal from some
other system to Windows).

                           -- Adam