Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Fri, 2006-09-15 at 20:53 +0200, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

> IMO, the idea to use Unicode for program sources is wrong. The language (be
> it formal or natural) should have a finite and reasonably small alphabet.
> Unicode is practically an open-end set of symbols most of them you wouldn't
> be able to either recognize or remember again.

Unicode is quite flexible and allows a project to choose a reasonable
subset of characters. A portable subset is fairly easy to describe
because both Ada and UCS define a common character set from which you
can choose. No lengthy discussions of how to interpret 8 bits,
no issues with conforming compilers.
Greek.Ω /= Electric.Ω is an issue in Ada 95, too, when you
use local character sets for two different files.

Shou1d the number l, sorry, 1, not occur in source text, because it
is too easy to miss the difference, so please, remove it from the
Ada grammar? ;-)

You can extend the Unicode subset chosen for the project later, without
introducing ambiguity or a configuration issue. Using Unicode for
program source text lets you write identifiers that just cannot coexists
in Latin_1, or any 8bit character set.



-- Georg