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Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:35:58 +0200
From: Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>
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Subject: Re: Avatox 1.0: Trouble with encoding in Windows
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Date: 2006-09-11T12:31:08+02:00
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Manuel Collado wrote:

> 1. The ASIS API should provide a way to know the character encoding of
> the source file (I think it doesn't).

Yes! This will help a lot in avoiding character set issues.
And it might help prevent dodgy arguments like the ones presented
by implementers against the clever requirement to write the
identifier π in the Ada 2005 library. :-)


> 2. The non-ASCII characters could be converted to XML character
> references (&#nnn;) by Avatox.

This is beyond my comprehension, in particular when XML does
have standardized character set support. Numeric character
entities will force me to look at geographical names
like España (Spain) or Łódź (in Poland)
written  Espa&#xF1;a  and  &#x141;&#xF3;d&#x17A;
respectively.

Will any Ada programmer find it pleasing to even write them as
character strings in this equivalent way?

   Country: Wide_String := "Espa" & Wide_Character'Val(241) & "a";
   Town: Wide_String := (
      Wide_Character'Val(16#141#),
      Wide_Character'Val(16#F3#),
      'd',
      Wide_Character'Val(16#17A#));

You could then go on and recommend writing Ada in the following style,
just because some text editing tool that you remember might not properly
handle white space:

   Town: String := "New" & Character'Val(32) & "York";

<steam>
If programmers don't start accepting that there are more
characters than can be expressed in 7bin ASCII and start
making less buggy text tools (including Ada tools)
then anyone will continue to have difficulties in international
communications.

I hope that ASIS is a chance to get this done.
</>

-- Georg