Re: Character Sets (plain text police report)

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <sparre@nbi.dk>]

Marin David Condic wrote:
> It might make an easy extension to the Ada standard to include 32-bit
> Unicode. After all, its pretty much just a matter of taking existing
> packages and changing a few things so you could have Wide_Wide_Character.
> The question is, would it have sufficient utility to make it worth the
> effort? (Is there much use out there for 32-bit characters?)

Maybe not directly (except for in the far east), but there 
is a rather large and growing indirect need for full support 
for ISO-10646.

In Europe people are starting to switch from ISO-8859 
encodings to the UTF-8 encoding of ISO-10646.  This means 
that although people in practice seldom will use more than 
the 470-something European characters, they will start to 
expect to have access to use all of ISO-10646.

> Perhaps if some additional utility was piled on top of it so that reading a
> text file, Ada would automatically determine what it was looking at and give
> you back text in the proper size (create something like "Universal_String"
> and a whole bunch of utilities around it so it would hold 8, 16 or 32-bit
> characters depending on how it was loaded) - but I don't see how that could
> be done for all text files.

Agreed.  One needs some kind of information about which 
encoding is used - but that is already the case.  The best 
solution I can think of is to demand that the operating 
system keeps track of the file type (including encoding for 
text files).  The second best solution is (IMHO) to 
introduce a sensible common standard encoding.  I don't know 
if it should be UTF-8 or raw 32-bit ISO-10646.  And I can 
certainly not advice people to use the current procedure on 
Unix systems, where each user chooses his/her assumed 
encoding of text files.

> The concept is a little vague in my mind, but I could imagine how something
> like this might be a useful idea for a standard Ada library. It really
> doesn't require any fundamental changes to the language.

No.  But it would be nice, if one could demand that 
compilers can handle UTF-8 or raw 32-bit ISO-10646 encoded 
source files.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"I don't want to gain immortality in my works.
  I want to gain it by not dying."