Re: Ada generics

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@arcor.de>]

On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 19:32 -0600, Randy Brukardt wrote:

> If that is a real concern, just insist that all of your programs are edited
> with a 1984-vintage MS-DOS editor (like I do ;-), and you won't possibly be
> able to have a problem. Indeed, I expect most programmers will continue to
> do this (use tools that don't support Unicode), so any new problems will be
> limited.

Maybe there is a chance that UTF-8 will show its advantages in
a trouble free transition from Latin-1 to UTF-8 where possible
(string literals made for 8bit character set displays might need
attention, I guess).
First, many tools can use UTF-8 files: Anything based on Eclipse works
well with UTF-8, GPS does, and VS.NET uses UTF-8 in all sorts of places.
VIM works just fine with UTF-8 files, and Emacs, having started
from the more general MULE character system supports Unicode, too,
in recent editions.

Second, recoding files from Latin-1 to UTF-8 should be no more than
a small shell script invoking the iconv tool, and then looking
at string literals in files that need to be ISO-8859-X encoded.
FWIW, 

#! /bin/sh
# Functions to help with the creation of UTF-8 Ada files from Latin-1
# Ada files
# Needs: grep, mawk (AWK that supports \ooo notation for characters)

ada_pat='\.\(ads\|adb\|ada\|spc\|bdy\)'
   # regular expression describing file name extensions of Ada files

repl_in_dir()
{
   # Copy Ada files from $1 to $2, replacing ISO-8859-1 characters with
   # corresponding UTF-8 characters. Call with two full paths.

   source=$1
   target=$2
   here=$(pwd)  # save current directory
   cd $source
   ls | grep "${ada_pat}$" | while read file
   do
      cat $file | iconv -f ISO_8859-1  -t UTF-8 > $target/$file
   done
   cd $here
}


check_strings()
{
   # List string literals X that have Character'pos(X(k)) > 8#177#
   # Run this in a directory of Ada files. Output is prefixed with
   # file name and line number.

   ls | grep "${ada_pat}$" | while read file
   do
      cat $file | { env FILENAME=$file mawk '
                      BEGIN  { OFS=":" }
                      /"[\000-\177]*[^\000-\177]/ {
                            print ENVIRON["FILENAME"],NR, $0
                      }'
                  }
   done
}