Re: Implementations are allowed (not required) to accept umlauts in co mments in Ada83

Re: Implementations are allowed (not required) to accept umlauts in co mments in Ada83

[dog.ee.lbl.gov!hellgate.utah.edu!caen!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!bu.ed]

In article <1992Oct21.171342.14240@wdl.loral.com> 
  mab@wdl39.wdl.loral.com (Mark A Biggar) writes:

>Ada 9x is adopting Latin-1 as its official character set, this includes
>using all the extra letters in identifiers and any latin-1 characters
>at all in comments.

Actually, the ISO WG9 (working group on Ada) has now allowed 
Standard.Character to be Latin-1 rather than ASCII (ISO-646)
in Ada 83 compilers.  As Mark implies, this will be required for Ada 9X.  

Furthermore, Ada 9X will have a "Wide_Character"
(and Wide_String) in Standard corresponding to the 16-bit 
Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of ISO 10646, otherwise known as Unicode.
Any Unicode character is permitted in comments (in fact, any character at
all is permitted in comments if you can get your compiler to swallow it,
though some characters might reduce portability of the source (or
at least its representation)).  

We are also considering allowing some of the BMP/Unicode 
characters in identifiers, either for all
compilers, or as a localization option.  This last part is still somewhat
up in the air, given the relatively recent approval of ISO 10646,
and the somewhat confliciting concerns of localization and portability.

>Mark Biggar
>mab@wdl1.wdl.loral.com

S. Tucker Taft   stt@inmet.com